Chapter 1

When I first started reading Chapter 1 I was not keen on the factors that led to globalization and the “flatteners” or “flattening forces” identified by Friedman such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Internet (Brown, 2012, p. 4).  I did not know what the “flatteners” and globalization had to do with career development.  As I continued reading it occurred to me that globalization and the “flatteners” were and are important to career development and how it has evolved over time.  It was interesting that the topic of social justice was discussed in this chapter because I would have thought that it would have been and may be explained more in depth in another chapter.  I think that social justice including economic equity (Brown, 2012, p. 5) is an important topic because it is prominent today. 

There is still today “inequality” among men and women and whites and minorities.  This is seen through the discrepancies in the employment rates and median income.  I think that this is closely related to career development.  As mentioned by others schools offer career options that may fit certain students better usually based on their gender and ethnicity.  Schools that have funding provide their students with planning their “next step”, such as college or a job.  Unfortunately students attending a school in an area of poverty or low funding students that are excelling are often the ones receiving the career development attention over the students who are just passing.  This made me think about career development programs in schools.  I grew up in a town in the country that had adequate funding and a career fair in high school every year.  The career fair was not in depth and there were not counselors to talk to about career development.  The counselors at my school seemed to be wrapped up in testing, scheduling, or students that were failing.  The career counseling that I received I did on my own by researching what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go to school.  This topic is quite interesting but I want to also discuss other aspects of Chapter one.

Others have mentioned the debate over the definitions about career.  There were five relatively recent definitions of career that were mentioned in the text.  The definitions of career included: “the totality of work one does in a lifetime; career = work + leisure; a sequence of positions that one holds during a lifetime of which occupation is only one; the course of events which constitutes a life, the sequence of occupations and other life roles which combine to express one’s commitment to work in or her total pattern of self-development; and careers are unique to each person and created by what one chooses or does not choose, they are dynamic and unfold throughout life, and integration of work with family, community, and leisure” (Brown, 2012, p. 14).  I thought that career was easy to define as the sequence of jobs in the same field of interest throughout ones’ life, but I can also see how education could be part of this sequence in career development along with how leisure and family are balanced with work.

Reference

Brown, D. (2012).  Career information, career counseling, and career development (10^th ed.).

            New York: Pearson Education, Inc.