Super's Career Stages
Updated 2026-08-10
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
Super's Career Stages, developed by Donald Super from the 1950s, describes vocational life as a sequence of five stages: growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, and decline, each with a dominant developmental task. Its core proposition is that the right career strategy depends on which stage the person occupies, so the same move can be wise at one stage and costly at another. The key qualifier is that the boundaries are approximate and careers can recycle, since adults often return to exploration after a disruption.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Stage diagnosis: identify which of the five career stages you are actually occupying right now. - Task matching: choose the strategy that matches the dominant developmental task of your current stage. - Recycling check: test whether a recent disruption has returned you to the exploration stage.
Anchor fast decisions
Each stage presents a task whose completion unlocks the next, so effort spent on the wrong task produces little progress. Exploration rewards breadth and tolerated failure, establishment rewards depth and accumulated capital, and maintenance rewards transfer to others. Knowing the stage prevents the common error of judging every decision by a single standard such as promotion speed.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
account_treeGenealogyexpand_more
menu_bookReferencesexpand_more
Source support: Explicit
- en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Career_developmentverified
PRIVATE NOTES · Only visible to you
SAVED Q&A
ENTRY Q&A · Private saving available
Ask with a clear boundary
thinkingmodels answers from published entry context only.
Your question is sent to thinkingmodels. The answer uses public entry context only.
RELATED MODELS