Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS)

Human survival and success require adapting to ever-changing circumstances. Career adaptability denotes the capacity to use psychosocial resources to adapt to changing contexts for career satisfaction and success. A meta-competency for effective career construction and life design, career adaptability offers a cross-nationally valid construct for understanding vocational behavior and assisting individuals to manage their careers within a changing world, local economies, and job markets. The advancement of career adaptability as a construct and focus of career intervention owes in large part to a wealth of literature that has accumulated to map the conceptual network and measurement of the construct. This literature has grown, especially within the past decade, accelerated by the work of concerted international collaborations. The Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS) represents the standard measure of career adaptability. A team of researchers from 13 countries initially constructed and validated the CAAS to measure career adaptability as a higher-order construct that subsumes four psychosocial resources for managing developmental tasks, occupational transitions, and work troubles. Thereby, the 24-item CAAS comprises 4 subscales with 6 items each to measure the career adapt-abilities of Concern (planfulness), Control (deliberateness), Curiosity (inquisitiveness), and Confidence (assuredness). This chapter reports on the development of the CAAS and validity evidence for its use from studies spanning 24 countries. Alternate forms of the CAAS include a 12-item short form, a behavioral measure, and a Francophone version that adds 7 additional items to the measure. The chapter also discusses a measure for Cooperation as a fifth interpersonal resource to support adapting behaviors.