ABSTRACT
With career counseling being a foundational pillar of the helping profession, it is no surprise that career counseling theories developed over the years have grown and branched off into more comprehensive ways of helping individuals with career issues. This chapter discusses several foundational theories with continued use in career counseling today. Specific attention is given to the most salient parts of these theories to give the reader a basic understanding of each theory. This chapter can be used as a starting point in understanding the landscape of career counseling. This chapter includes Super’s Life-Space, Life Span Theory; Roe’s Personality Theory of Career Choice; Gottfredson’s Theory of Circumscription, Compromise, and Self-Creation; Holland’s Theory of Types and Person-Environment Interactions; Krumboltz’s Learning Theory of Career Counseling; Lent, Brown, and Hackett’s Social Cognitive Career Theory; and Savickas’s Career Construction Theory.
