Financial or family problems may lead to a delay in rescheduling a course sequence in some career preparation curricula, such as nursing or architecture. Failing required courses in some competitive majors may mean a student needs to rethink his or her choice. Each of these reasons has implications for the student's academic status, personal life, or career goals. Each of these reasons prompts a different set of questions that advisors might ask to clarify the student's situation. For example, a student may want to drop a course because of financial stress, family problems, or failure in a course. How advisors listen, interpret, and answer questions effectively is an art. Academic advisors expect students to ask them questions. The INQUIRE phase of the decision-making process involves identifying students' academic and career concerns, clarifying their needs, and making appropriate responses that help them move to the information-collecting phase. It is important to understand that the different phases in the 3-I Process are fluid and flexible. This whole process of planning and action, according to Tiedeman and O'Hara, is ordinarily progressive, but regression and recycling are possible. They begin to identify with their new environments by assimilation of the environment's values and goals become highly involved and interact assertively, not passively, in the new environment and eventually synthesize the group's purpose with their own. Although not included, Tiedeman and O'Hara's action stage involves individuals living out their decisions by becoming part of the new environments they have chosen (for example, college or workplace). The 3-I Process encompasses the planning stages of Tiedeman and O'Hara's paradigm. Students' self-images and images of the future are elaborated and perfected. In the planning stage, students engage in the process of closure about their commitments and plan the details and next steps that need to be implemented. They also consider the consequences of their decisions and begin further planning. They eventually make a definite commitment in the choice stage and feel satisfied and relieved. As they move into the crystallization stage, they are making progress toward a choice, begin to recognize alternatives, and weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each. In the planning stage, students move through exploration, where they have vague ideas about the future, have no plan of action yet, and no negative choices. These theorists espoused a paradigm for decision making that includes a planning stage and an action stage. The 3-I Process is based on many decision-making frameworks but most closely resembles that of a theoretical construct developed by Tiedeman and O'Hara (1963).

Career planning process 3 steps