The PIC Model

1. The PIC Model Prof. Itamar Gati The Hebrew University Jerusalem

2. Today’s presentation will present (and try to justify) the claim that • Career counseling may be viewed as decision counseling, which aims at facilitating the clients' decision-making process, and promoting better career decisions.

3. How? • By presenting the PIC model (Prescreening, In-depth exploration and Choice), highlighting the ways it addresses the shortcomings of the theoretical approaches which dominate the career-guidance field • By demonstrating PIC’s clinical applicability by presenting MBCD - an Internet-based career guidance system based on the model’s rationale • By presenting research which examined the theoretical validity and practical effectiveness of the PIC model and MBCD for facilitating clients' career decision-making.

4. Part 1The PIC Model: Rationale and Stages Or: Who needs another model?

5. Theoretical approaches dominating the field of career decision-making • Career development theories -- focus on the developmental circumstances in which decisions are made and the effects of these changes on career decisions • Person-Environment Fit approach -- focuses on the congruence between individuals' characteristics and the characteristics of an occupation

6. The problem: Lack of reference to the essence of the decision-making process • P-E Fit approach – focus mainly on the outcomes of the decision-making process • Career development theories focus on the developmental changes that occur before and between decision tasks • the challenge is to design a systematic procedure that can facilitate the process of locating the congruent occupational alternatives in specific situations requiring choices along the developmental continuum

7. Career Decision-Making in the 21th Century • Today, career decision-making is a multi-decisional, un-predictable, dynamic, and life-lasting process with numerous transitions; thus, individuals should be trained as autonomous decision-makers (while P-E Fit models typically focus on a static match) • Today, cultural emphasis on self-fulfilment and personal satisfaction increases individuals' awareness to changes in their preferences over time (while P-E fit models make a one-time classification of the individual into one or more personality types – a snap-shot)

8. Choosing a Career as a Decision-Making Process: Unique Features • Amount of Information: • Often large N of alternatives • Large N of considerations and factors • Within-occupation variance • Practically unlimited • Quality of Information • Soft, subjective • Fuzzy • Inaccurate or biased

9. Choosing a Career as a Decision-Making Process: Unique Features(Cont.) Uncertainty • about the individual’s future preferences • about future career options • unpredictable changes and opportunities • choice implementation Non-cognitive Factors • emotional and personality-related factors • necessity for compromise • actual or perceived social barriers and biases

10. CDM Difficulties of 15,000 surfers on the Future Directions website (Gati & Meyers, 2003) • Are you experiencing difficulties in making your career decision?

11. Implications and Conclusion • Many factors contribute to the complexity of the career decision-making process, and to the difficulties involved • Decision-making models can be adapted to facilitate career decision-making • Career counseling may be viewed as decision counseling, which aims at facilitating the clients' decision-making process and promoting better career decisions.

12. Among the salient difficulties is “lack of information aboutthe career decision-making process” (4) The Distribution of the Three Levels of Difficulties (negligible, moderate, salient difficulty) in the Ten Difficulty Categories and Four Groups(N = 6192; H-Hebrew, E-English, p-paper and pencil, I-Internet)

13. Types of decision-making models 1- Normative models: • Dominated decision theories for many decades • Aim at developing procedures for making optimal choices, based on the assumption that human beings are rational decision-makers • Empirical evidence demonstrates that this assumption typically does not hold, especially when the number of potential alternatives is large • Thus, normative models are overly rational, too abstract and too quantitative for everyday decisions as well as for decision counseling

14. Types of decision-making models2- Descriptive models: • Investigate the ways people actually make decisions; reveal biases, inconsistencies and limited rationality, leading to less than optimal decisions. • Because descriptive models cannot serve as a reference point for justifiable decisions, they cannot be used as a basis for adequate decision-guidance.

15. Types of decision-making models 3- Prescriptive decision models: • Aim at outlining a framework for making better decisions, while acknowledging human limitations • Correspond with the intuitive ways individuals make decisions • In the context of career decision making, aim at providing a framework for a systematic process for making better career decisions, instead of striving for rational ones

16. Prescriptive models should: • be intuitively appealing • be feasible – compatible with cognitive and material limitations • avoid complicated calculations on the one hand, and fuzzy abstraction on the other • strive for maximal simplification but at the same time minimize the potential loss resulting from a non-comprehensive search process • offer multi-level complexity

17. Our proposal - The PIC Model Prescreening, In-depth exploration, Choice (Gati & Asher, 2001) • PIC is a prescriptive model designed to possess these desirable features by offering a systematic framework for career-decision making • Facilitates the decision-making process by separating it into three distinct stages: - Prescreening - In-depth exploration - Choice

18. The PIC Model • Encompasses the entire career-decision making process • Clients can begin the process from any of the stages according to their progress in the decision-making process • Is a dynamic and flexible decision process • Encourages clients to move back and forth between the stages in order to rethink and reinforce their previous responses

19. Before Beginning the Decision-Making Process: Assessing and Increasing the Client’s Readiness • Evaluating the client’s general level of career indecision • Examining his or her specific difficulties in reaching a decision • Assessing career choice anxiety • Identifying dysfunctional beliefs • Explaining the steps of the decision-making process to the client

20. Prescreening • Goal: Locating a small set (about 7) of promising alternatives that deserve further, in-depth exploration • Method: Sequential Elimination (based on the elimination-by-aspects strategy - Tversky, 1972, which was shown to be compatible with the ways people actually make decisions) • Outcome: A list of verified promising alternatives worth further, in-depth exploration

21. Steps in Sequential Elimination Locating and prioritizing aspects or factors Explicate the within-factor preferences of the most important factor not yet considered Eliminate incompatible alternatives yes Too many promising alternatives? no This is the recommended list of occupations worth further, in-depth exploration

22. Career-Related Aspects • The search for promising career alternatives is based on individuals' preferences in career-related aspects -- all variables that can be used to characterize either individuals' preferences and abilities or career alternatives • The use of a large set of career-related aspects provides a more accurate description of both preferences and occupations, thus leading to a better person-environment fit

23. 1) Selecting the relevant aspects to be used in the search • it is impractical to consider all possible aspects; hence, the individual must choose a subset of aspects to focus on • The list should include objective constraints (e.g., disability), personal competencies (e.g., creativity, technical skills), and core personal preferences

24. 2) Ranking the aspects by importance • The sequential elimination process begins with the most important aspect, continues with the aspect second in importance, and so on, until the list of remaining alternatives is short enough (i.e., 7 or less) • Ranking is necessary in order to avoid stopping the search before the most important aspects have been considered

25. 3) Defining the range of acceptable levels for the more important aspects • Within aspect preferences: descriptive labels are used to represent within-aspect qualitative variations • The individuals’ preferred level is labeled the optimal level. Additional levels, which are less desirable but still acceptable, are labeled acceptable levels • The choice of a compromise range explicitly guides individuals to consider compromise, encouraging a more realistic perspective

26. 4) Comparison of individuals’ range of acceptable levels with the alternatives characteristic levels • Occupations are also characterised by a range of levels ( within-occupation variations) • For each aspect, the characteristics of all potential alternatives are compared with the individual’s preferences, and incompatible alternatives are eliminated • The process is repeated for the remaining aspects (in descending order of importance) until the number of remaining “promising” alternatives is manageable.

27. A Schematic Presentation of theSequential Elimination Process (within aspects, across alternatives) Potential Alternatives 1 2 3 4 . . . . N Aspects a (most important) b (second in importance) c . n Promising Alternatives

28. Sequential elimination is a non-compensatory decision strategy • even a small gap between the individual's preferred levels and the characteristics of the occupation is enough to eliminate an alternative • an advantage in one attribute cannot compensate for a disadvantage in another (indeed, in important decisions such as career decisions, not all disadvantages can be compensated for)

29. Four Examples of a within-aspect compatibility test: A comparison between the Acceptable Range for the individual (ar), and the Characteristic levels of an alternative (cl) (a) Inclusion (b) Partial Overlap (c) No Overlap (d) Almost Overlap ar ar cl ar cl cl cl ar LA-L8

30. Sensitivity Analysis • A potentially suitable alternative might be eliminated because of a slight mismatch in a single aspect – therefore, there is a need for a "safety check“; reexamining the implications of changes in the individual's inputs upon the outcome – the list of "promising" career options: • Rethinking the range of acceptable levels reported • Understanding why certain alternatives considered intuitively appealing before the systematic search were eliminated • Locating alternatives that were discarded due to only a small discrepancy in a single aspect and considering compromise

31. The Five Steps of the Prescreening Stage Initial List of Potential Alternatives (a) Selecting Relevant Aspects (b) Ranking Aspects by Importance (c) Defining the Range of Acceptable Levels for the Most Important Aspect Not Yet Considered (d) Comparing the Individual’s Range of Acceptable Levels with the Characteristic Levels of the Alternatives: Eliminating Incompatible Alternatives Is the list of remaining occupations too long? Yes No (e) Sensitivity Analysis List of Promising Alternatives LA-L7b

32. In-depth exploration • Goal: Locating alternatives that are not only promising, but suitable for the individual. • Method: “zoom in" on one promising alternative at a time, collecting additional, comprehensive information about it: • Is the occupation INDEED suitable for me? • verifying compatibility with one’s preferences in the most important aspects • considering compatibility within the less important aspects • considering willingness to meet the occupation’s requirements • Am I suitable for the occupation? • probability of actualization • fit with the core aspects of the occupation • Outcome: A few most suitable alternatives (about 3-4)

33. Core Aspects • While many aspects are required to describe any career option, usually only a few of them are crucial for the characterization of a particular occupation. • core aspects significantly contribute to the prediction of occupational-choice satisfaction

34. Promising Alternative Does the alternative suit me? Do I fit the alternative? A Suitability Test for a promising Alternative during the In-depth Exploration Stage Examining probability of actualization Verifying compatibility with preferences in the most important aspects Confirming the fit to the core aspects of the alternative Considering compatibility with preferences in the less important aspects as well Unsuitable Alternative Suitable Alternative LA-L10

35. A Schematic Presentation of the In-depth Exploration Stage (within-alternative, across aspects) Promising Alternatives 1 2 3 4 5 6 Suitable Alternatives 4 5 2 LA-L9

36. Choice • Goal: To choose the most suitable alternative and rank-order additional, second-best alternatives • Method: • A detailed, refined comparison among the suitable alternatives, focusing on the differences among them • pinpointing the most suitable alternative • is it likely that I can actualize it? • if not: selecting second-best alternative(s) • if yes: am I confident in my choice? • if not: Return to In-depth exploration stage • if yes: Done! • Outcome: An alternative or a rank-order of alternatives

37. Comparing and evaluating the suitable alternatives • The comparison can now be based on a normative-compensatory model, aimed at locating the optimal alternative, because: • the number of alternatives under consideration is small it is possible to evaluate each alternative across all aspects • the considered alternatives are all acceptable, thus the compromises involved in a trade-off are more subtle

38. The Cancellation Operation (based on the search for dominance model, Montgomery, 1989) • Attributes that the individual perceives as advantageous and as related to one another are grouped and used to counterbalance an advantage of the other alternative on a different combination of attributes, which are equivalent in desirability until the net advantages of one alternative will show that it is more suitable

39. A Schematic Presentation of the Choice Stage Return to In-depth exploration stage Suitable Alternatives Is there only one suitable alternative? Compare the suitable alternatives and choose the most suitable one No Yes Most suitable alternative identified Select second-best alternative(s) Is its actualization certain? No Yes The choice is made Am I confident with my choice? No Yes Done! LA-L11

42. PIC versus P-E Fit Approaches • Common Feature: • The goal is to maximize the fit between the individual and work environment. • Differences: • P-E Fit mainly focuses on the outcome, whereas PIC also focuses on the process. • Screening which is based on aspects (rather than on interests or needs only) is “richer” and more flexible. • P-E Fit implies a single-step prescreening (without explicating additional steps), whereas PIC prescribes a multi-step, systematic, and interactive process. • The notion of core aspects yields a promise for improving congruence.

43. PIC versus Normative Decision Theory • Common Feature: • The choice is the outcome of a systematic, analytic decision process. • Differences: • “Bounded Rationality” in PIC substitutes Rationality in NDT. • PIC is less quantitative (but still permits a structured search during prescreening). • PIC is less complex and more natural. • PIC is especially useful in cases where N of potential alternatives is large

44. To sum up: The PIC model • The search for suitable alternatives is based on: • a wide set of career-related aspects rather than only vocational interests, • A range of levels to represent both the individual's preferences and the occupations • Includes a reexamination of one's input  therefore the P-E fit resulting from it should lead to greater career-associated well-being than that based on a single-step-based person-occupation match.

45. Summary (Continued) • The PIC model turns the complex process of career choice into a sequence of well-defined tasks • Career-guidance based on the PIC model allows the deliberating client to play not only an active role, but a leading one in the decision-process • The PIC model deals with career choice from a cognitive point of view, however, some of the emotional problems and indecisiveness in choosing a career may be attributed to the lack of a framework for approaching career decision making - provided by PIC