Career Maturity: The Construct's Validity, Vitality, and Viability

Career maturity is a useful construct for studying adolescents, but it has limits. Professional counselors need to integrate personality and decision‐making style into research on career maturity as well as give more than a passing nod to developmental theory. They cannot study career development at the individual level alone; context matters and is an integral part of career development. The amount of variance in individual career development accounted for by context and change may be so great that longitudinal research on individuals may not be worthwhile.