Career as Affective Journey: How Constant Flux Challenges the Search for Career Pathways and Counseling

Individuals have to actively manage their careers and with it their identities in this life domain. With the help of empirical findings and field reports, we will show how these changing demands need to be negotiated as part of identity development and, thus, career counseling processes. While Dialogical Self Theory (DST) is used to describe the constant negotiation of the self (identity) including dialogues within the person as well as dialogues with others, the Trajectory Equifinality Model (TEM) will help depict the development of career pathways that result from both - with a special focus on affective linking. Based on DST and TEM, it is argued that finding the right career is an ongoing and affective process and with that a developmental phenomenon that can be supported by different means: typologies that relate the individual to a larger population as well as idiographic approaches.