2. Types of Indecision
Need for Career Information
◦ Need more factual information and experience regarding
various occupations before feel able to make a good career
decision
Career Choice Anxiety
Experience anxiety when thinking of making career
decisions (Anxiety is a normal part of decision making
because people who are anxious tend to avoid doing the
necessary planning and information seeking required for
making food career decisions)
Intervention:
Needs support and focus
Getting too much information about many different
careers can confuse and create more anxiety
Needs emotional support and focused information.
Needs to focus on a handful of majors that are
consistent with personality characteristics and
interests
3. Types of Indecision
Need for Self-Knowledge
◦ Feel need to conduct self discovery before they can make a
career decisions
◦ Need more information about their interests, abilities, and
personality characteristics before beginning the decision-making
process
General Indecisiveness
◦ Students who have difficulty making decisions in several areas of
their lives. For example, students who are generally indecisive
may have difficulty deciding on what to do with friends on the
weekend, which kind of computer to buy, etc. These students also
tend to have some anxiety with decisions and tend to have lower
self-esteem
◦ Intervention:
Provide support for working on self-esteem and increasing
career self-efficacy
Provide career information and encouragement to make
good decisions
4. Rational Decision-Making
Model
Define Goal
◦ what do you want to accomplish and by when
Assess Alternatives
◦ what are your alternatives and are they consistent with your
values
Gather Information
◦ what do you need to know about your alternatives
◦ what sources will help you gather more info
Assess Outcomes or Consequences
◦ what is the probability of success of each alternative
◦ can you eliminate any alternatives
◦ what are you willing to sacrifice for your most desired alternative
Establish a Plan of Action
◦ what is your plan given all of your information
◦ what is your timeline to carry this out
◦ what are the necessary conditions to carry this out
5. Intuitive Decision-Making
Model
Creative
Rely on “gut feelings”
Use imagination to think about future
Often spontaneous without active information
gathering
Useful when time is of the essence and fast
decisions are needed without time for planning
Helps us in interpersonal or social situations
where facts are often not available (first
impressions)
Can create poor results if used as a substitute for
information gathering
Difficult to distinguish from wishful thinking or
personal bias
