Thursday 23 July 08:15
- 09:45
Hall: 28 - Room 6 SPT
Chair and Presenter:
Cinamon Rachel Gali
Discussant:
Blustein David
Division: Division 16: Counseling Psychology
Decent work and sustainable careers are increasingly recognized as essential for individual well-being, social inclusion, and societal development. Building on the Psychology of Working Theory (PWT) and the sustainable careers framework, this symposium brings together five empirical and conceptual contributions that illuminate how developmental stage and cultural context shape access to decent work and the pursuit of sustainable careers.
The symposium begins with a study from Costa Rica (Murillo Aguilar et al.), which highlights the critical role of vocational guidance in secondary education as a pathway to learning, employability, and social transformation. Expanding the focus on adolescence, Ran explores the voices of Israeli youth with learning disabilities and ADHD, showing how family support shapes their future perceptions and career aspirations. Continuing with young people in transition, Parada and colleagues present longitudinal data from Finland, on how turning points in goal construction and action-taking influence the post-high school transition and subsequent career sustainability.
Moving to midlife, Gortler Segev and Cinamon examine how temporal dimensions of work-family relations affect teachers' experiences across one academic year, demonstrating the implications of professional stage and organizational cycles for sustainable career paths. Finally, Karacan Ozdemir and Blustein broaden the lens to late adulthood, introducing a Psychology of Working Theory model of decent retirement, which integrates macro-level constraints with psychological resources to address adjustment and life satisfaction in the retirement transition.
Together, these studies provide a developmental arc spanning adolescence through retirement, across diverse cultural contexts—Costa Rica, Israel, Portugal, Finland, Türkiye, and the U.S. By situating individual career pathways within broader sociocultural and temporal frameworks, the symposium advances a more holistic understanding of how to foster decent work and sustainable careers across the life span.
