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Career Theory and Advising

Career Theory and Advising

Moving Away From Post-Positivism

Tips from a Career Development Professional on building your career path


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Post-positivism is an understanding of the world that while there is a single objective reality it is not possible to fully understand it. That’s great, it’s an improvement on positivism which assumed that it was in fact possible to know everything fully and observation was neutral. But post-positivism goes on to claim that it is fully possible to empirically verify experience and observation, to fully identify and state all biases and contextual differences. That’s where I think we need to be wary of it. In the same way that different people experience the same sensation in different ways, even if we accept that there is only one reality we need to accept that our experiences and observations are not only not neutral they can’t be completely replicated either. There are too many contextual factors at play.

So what are the other options then? In Career Theory although much of the early work was tied to post-positivism (Parsons, Holland, Super) today it’s been recognized that there are too many contextual factors to ever truly identify and explain all of them. Instead the Pragmatist, Interpretivist, Constructivist, Transformative, Critical, Indigenous, and Relational paradigms are used. The choice will depend on a number of factors, but in general you can determine it by whether the theorist thinks that reality is observed and experienced as impacted mostly by:

  • Individual constructions of reality
    • Pragmatist
  • Social constructions of reality
    • Interpretivist
    • Constructivist
  • Historical constructions of reality
    • Transformative
    • Critical
  • Relational constructions of reality
    • Indigenous
    • Relational

That of course is an incredible simplification, but hopefully it helps for now.


This site was created by Noah Arney, a Career Development Professional working at Thompson Rivers University and was created in Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, within Secwépemc’ulucw.

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Career Theory and Advising