the name of the class(course)
the name of school (university)
Career Development Project :Judith Gray
Choosing future career is one of the most important decisions we make in our life. Today in 21st century counseling and career guidance became system of theories and strategies with developed empirical and theoretical base. These theories can help us to understand the process of our career development.
We would like to thank all those people who made this project possible and very valuable experience for us. First of all, we would like to express deepest sense of Gratitude to our Teacher, Mr. /Mrs. (put here last name), who supported us all the time and gave us very important advice and encouragement during this time. We thank him/her for systematic guidance and great effort that he put into our training in the scientific field. We would like to express our very sincere gratitude to Missis Judith Gray for providing us information about her that became basis for our project. And of course i am thankful to my partner, (name of partner) for his/her assistance, fun time spent together.
First of all, we want to clarify our task, make it clear how we used knowledge from our lectures in process of analyzing Missis Gray’s life. The main task was to interview a local resident allocated by our teacher about her career and what affected her development. Before an interview, we studied 6 career theories. We made contact with our informant and arranged an interview. After meeting, we analyzed gathered information and now we are going to present the results of our work.
Let’s introduce her background first; she was born into a normal family in Canada, Montreal. There are four members in her family. Her mother was a teacher in the University, her father was a writer, writing about Canadian history, her younger sister is a journalist, and her older sister is a teacher. When she was studying A-levels, she was really good at math and science. Hence, her tutor encouraged her to study biology in the University. At the meantime, she was planning to be a doctor after university. Furthermore, she gapped two years to travel around world and study French before going to University. When she was a student in the University, she took medical certification exam two times, but she failed. Then she came to the UK for a holiday, where she met her husband. Then Judith decided to live in the UK with her husband. Plus there is another reason why she decided to stay here. The government offered her an opportunity to study biology in the University of Saint John, due to at that time; British government needed a lot of biology teachers. After she achieved postgraduate certification, she started teaching French in Stone house in 1987 until it closed. In 1993, lottery funded her to run a charity organization in Romania. The aim of this organization was helping teenagers to develop social skills. When she came back from Romania, she went to another school to teach GCSE biology until 2000. She decides to teach English one to one at home and she is still doing this at moment.
Let's analyze Judith Gray according to seven-point plan created by .(Rodger,1952) In his work he made a plan with 7 attributes. Using these plan, guidance practitioners and trainers can analyze and evaluate jobs and candidates in order to match appropriate candidates to job positions. Basically, she is female, who can speak two languages? One is English and another one is French. Then she achieved the highest qualification is PGCE of biology. For intelligence, she is good at dealing with different background people. Also, she is experts in biology area. What is more, she has a great passion for running a charity in order to help more and more people.
The second part is John Holland-career theory. John Holland distinguished six personality types. He noted that every person can find out to what kind of personality type he/she belong to, the careers and college majors that fit you best. We determined that Judith Gray has two personality types. They are social and enterprising. Social person is trustworthy, helpful and friendly person who likes to help people, solve social problems, this person is very good at teaching, giving information and nursing. The main features of enterprising person are sociability, energy and ambitions. These people are ready to lead people, to sell ideas and things, like success in any type of activity, for example, leadership, business or politics. We can see that she is good at socially. The one of reasons is that she traveled around world. She met a lot of people who has different background. Also, as we all know she is owner of charity organization, so she is quiet enterprising and this charity organization does help a lot of people which is in Romania and operate well until now.
E. G. Krumboltz thought that our career decisions are influenced by our surrounding "community"- family, neighbors, teachers, the media and ethnic and religious group. Our community can have an effect on our decisions that we make. As for Judith Gray, in her youth she was encouraged by her tutor to study biology at University who noticed her very good knowledge at biology. Another example is a holiday in the United Kingdom. May be she did not expect that her life would change and she move to other country. But when she was there she met her future husband and also she was offered by the Government an opportunity to study biology at University of Saint John.
According to my partner’s said early, her family’s background is all about liberal arts which influenced her to be a teacher
The final one is opportunity structure. According to Ken Roberts's opportunity theory, our choice is usually can be foreseen and determined by our background. For example, traditional occupational areas, such as mining we expect the young person to continue the generation of miners. Environment around us can determine our choice or even remove choice from us. The reason why she became a teacher is that Britain needed teacher who had biology backgrounds at that time. Basic on this, local government offer her an opportunity to study further about biology.
This project gave us an opportunity to look at process of career development from different sides. Sometimes we don't expect that our background and even unexpected opportunity can play very important role for our future.
References
Rodger,A.,1974.The seven point plan.Windsor:NEFR [for the] National Institute of Industrial Psychology.
Holland, J.,1997. Making vocational choices: A theory of vocational personalities and work environment.Odessa,FL: Psychological Assessment Resources,Inc.
