Interview with Mark Watson

Australian Journal of Career Development, Autumn, 2008

Mark Watson is a professor and head of the Psychology Department of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in South Africa. his research focuses on career development and career assessment of primary, secondary and tertiary students from all South African population groups. Mark has published extensively in international journals, is the co-editor of two career books, has contributed book chapters to several international career texts, and is a co-developer of an international qualitative career assessment tool. he is presently on the editorial advisory board of several national and international career journals.

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My career development has been a gradual evolvement within the field of secondary and tertiary education. In order to attend university, I applied for a government teacher's bursary which obligated me to teach at a secondary high school on completion of my studies. This did not happen straight away as my initial choice of majors in Latin and English shifted to Psychology. I was fortunate in securing a tutorial position after my bachelor's degree in the Department of Psychology of what was then the University of Port Elizabeth. This allowed me to complete both my honours and master's degrees before meeting my bursary obligations. I was then appointed a teacher-counsellor at a co-educational high school in Port Elizabeth where I spent five happy years. The school drew its student population from across the socioeconomic spectrum and I was consequently faced with a wide diversity of personal and career issues in my guidance classes and my counselling sessions. A major challenge I faced was to assist students towards tertiary education who lacked the financial means and even parental support to do so. I am still in contact with several of these students, some of whom have become prominent medical specialists and captains of industry.

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During my last two years at the school I began lecturing part-time at Nelson Mandela university, delivering an afternoon course to teacher-counsellors in training. My first career change came about when the Head of Psychology offered me a permanent lecturing position. I was well-entrenched in my school position and after much contemplation turned the offer down. A year later the offer was repeated but this time with the proviso that it would not be offered again. I took the offer with some reluctance after much soul searching. One of the factors involved in this decision was a piece paper that several students had signed and slipped under my office door. It was a quote which said, 'For stay, though the hours burn in the night, is to freeze and crystallize and be bound in a mould'. Those who have heard me speak in Australia will know how much a quote can influence my thinking!

I have been at Nelson Mandela ever since, although my career has continued to evolve. For much of the first decade here my primary function was lecturing. This I did at various undergraduate and postgraduate levels. A turning point for me was the advice from my Head of Department that promotion was only possible if I developed some sort of publication record. This move towards research was undertaken with the same reluctance that I displayed when leaving secondary for tertiary education. I wrote initially out of necessity and my first published article in 1986 (in the Journal of Vocational Behavior) was based on my doctoral research on the career development of a disadvantaged South African population group. It was this research, coupled with my practical experience as a teacher-counsellor, which led me further into the field of career psychology. I have never left it, although there has been personal evolvement within my research and practice over subsequent decades.

Much of that evolvement has come about as a consequence of international collaborative research over the last decade. And much of that collaboration has been with some of your most prominent Australian career researchers--Mary McMahon, Wendy Patton and Peter Creed. This collaborative research has also evolved over time. When I first started visiting Australia nearly a decade ago I worked with Wendy and Peter primarily in quantitative career research. Over time I have worked more closely with Mary and Wendy in the development of the My Systems of Career Influences (MSCI) workbook that operationalises their Systems Theory Framework of career development.

This research and instrument development reflects the growing need that I have felt to become more qualitative in my perspectives on career development. For some time, I had felt increasingly frustrated that the theoretical paradigms within which I taught and researched did not sufficiently capture the reality of the contexts within which most South Africans shaped their career development. In my view, career is all about context and never more so than in a country where context has been manipulated and restricted by political ideologies.

More recently, I have continued to work with Mary and Wendy on the adaptation of the MSCI for use with adults. This has involved fieldwork in Australia, South Africa and England. I have also been busy with Mary researching children's career development. We have been exploring the career development of both Australian and South African primary school children for several years now and at present are researching the career development of Xhosa-speaking rural children and rural Australian children. This year also sees the tenth year of a longitudinal study in which I have been tracking the same 45 South African children from their pre-school years. They are all now in high school and interviewing them annually has revealed interesting trends in their occupational aspirations. We have also videoed these children's reflections on their earlier occupational aspirations and how they understand changes in these aspirations over their career development to date.