Super- Super's theory

Donald Super influenced the idea that developing a sense of self and
realise that you change over time is important when planning your
career.
One of Donald Super's greatest contributions to career development has been his
emphasis on the importance of the development of self-concept. According to Super,
self-concept changes over time, and develops through experience. As such, career
development is lifelong. 
Super developed the theories and work of colleague Eli Ginzberg – he thought that
Ginzberg’s work had weaknesses, which he wanted to address. Super extended
Ginzberg’s life and career development stages from three to five, and included
different substages.
Super argues that occupational preferences and competencies, along with an
individual’s life situations, all change with time and experience. Super developed the
concept of vocational maturity, which may or may not correspond to chronological
age: people cycle through each of these stages when they go through career
transitions.

Super states that in making a vocational choice individuals are expressing

their self-concept, or understanding of self, which evolves over time. People
seek career satisfaction through work roles in which they can express
themselves and further implement and develop their self-concept.
Contextual Perspective: Social Roles And Their Interaction Across The Life Span

The third segment of Super’s theory brings forward a contextual perspective, that is, the view of career
development in the context of all life roles enacted by an individual. The work role, albeit of central
importance for many people in our culture, is only one among many life roles that an individual occupies
in his or her life. None of the roles can be properly understood without taking into account the whole
constellation of roles.

Already in his early theoretical writings, Super referred to work as a way of life and noted that
satisfactory vocational adjustment is possible only when both the nature of work and the way of life
complement an individual’s aptitudes, interests, and values. However, this interdependency of various
spheres of life is more completely addressed in Supers’ later writings, when he developed his life-span,
life-space view to career development and portrayed it graphically in his popular Life-Career Rainbow.
Super conceives life space as a constellation of social functions arranged in a pattern of core and
peripheral roles. People play a variety of roles during their life. Some of them begin early in the life
course (e.g., that of child), others later (e.g., that of student), or still later (e.g., that of pensioner). At
some life stages, a number of simultaneous roles (e.g., that of worker, spouse, homemaker, parent, and
citizen) may constitute an individual’s life structure. However, usually two or three roles are salient or
relatively more important than others. The salient life roles constitute the core of a person; they are
fundamental for the person’s identity and essential for life satisfaction. The fact that people play several
simultaneous roles means that roles interact and impact one another. The interaction among the roles
can be supportive, supplementary, compensatory, or neutral. It can also be conflicting if some of the
roles absorb too much of the available time and energy. As a matter of fact, for most people the
interpenetration of different spheres of life is inevitable in some life stages. By combining the life space
with the life-span or developmental perspective, the Rainbow model shows how the role constellation
changes with life stages. As Super noted, life roles wax and wane over time.

This simple account was indeed needed to clearly emphasize an all-too-often forgotten point—that
peoples’ careers cannot be understood outside of their social context. To fully understand an
individual’s career, it is necessary to explore the whole web of his or her life roles. After all, according to
a more recent view of Super’s, it is the constellation of role interactions that constitutes the career.