Career Self-Efficacy Theory: Back to the Future

Abstract

This article begins by reviewing the scientific origins of research on career self-efficacy, highlighting its original development as a means of understanding the career development of women and discussing its development through the years into what is now, along with its extension as social cognitive career theory, a widely applicable major approach to the understanding and facilitation of the career development process. Concerns about current research efforts are discussed. The first is the tendency of researchers to overlook the fact that the concept of self-efficacy must be linked to a specific behavioral domain to have meaning. As a corollary, measures of self-efficacy expectations must be developed with careful and exact specification of the behavioral domain in question. Detailed suggestions are provided for the construction of such measures. A second major concern is the lack of familiarity of many researchers with the theory that underlies this work, in particular, Bandura’s theory and its elaborations. The article praises the extensive research attention given to these exceedingly useful theories (self-efficacy and social cognitive) and suggests that more careful attention to the theoretical underpinnings and issues of conceptualization and measurement would be beneficial.