Career Salience

Most adult learners have different reasons of pursuing postgraduate studies. Younger professionals probably have the excitement to begin their postgraduate studies and most often than not, they are able to develop an independent way of working right from the start. Other learners feel less confident in the beginning undoubtedly because it was just a requirement from their supervisors. According to Merriam & Caffarella, as cited by Chang, S.C et al in 2007, adults’ primary reason to learn is because of those “largely practical and skill oriented matters rather than academic”. Thus, as their experiences become broader in relation to their awareness of world of work and of their personal insights, adult learners tend to realize the status of

These two depict about how much an individual put care about work and career respectively. It also explains the degree one considers as priority in his/her life. Whatever profession is adopted by a person, the person works for it to meet his/her goals. Clients with low career salience may benefit from education, and experiences that increase the relative importance of work in their lives (Savickas, 2001). These two constructs were operationally defined and differentiated by Allen and Ortlepp (2002) which were greatly based in Greenhaus’ concept of career salience. According to them, Career Salience (CS) is defined as the relative importance and personal worth of a career within the individual’s total life while Work Salience (WS) is then simply defined as the relative importance and personal worth of work in an individual’s total life. In addition, they also elaborated that CS explores the importance of a specific long-term pattern of employment possibly involved to a skill, knowledge or an organization, while WS deals simply with the importance of working or being

It is also becoming an integral part of human resource development for most industries. On the basis of the literatures cited, a number of factors interact to cause adult career development. These include gender and age-related differences in career stages, motivation to learning as well as difference sin work and career salience levels. Understanding work and career salience could be a powerful resource for the HRD department of industries to motivate employees toward learning and performance outcomes. Incentives and rewards that are deemed to be valuable for the employees will be effective especially if they see equal benefits both for personal career development and performance satisfaction for the part of the employers. As a result, when work and career salience are considered and paired with reward systems, the resulting reward system will be helpful in the organization as it meet its objectives. These literatures and studies related to career development have implications for career counseling, career advancement, and programs to aid career development. At the same time, understanding how work and career salience varies as a function of the different life stages as explained in Super’s theory, will bring effective career development strategies, as well as organization development interventions across the diverse demographics in