chap 5

According to the book, “self-efficacy is a person’s belief about his or her chances of successfully accomplishing a specific task.” The topic of self-efficacy interested me because I never knew that there was a term for one’s self-confidence in completing a task. The sources for self-efficacy are prior experience, behavior models, persuasion from others, and assessment of physical/emotional state. When self-efficacy is applied to the work environment, it reminds me of my student ambassador job where I am required to give tours to prospective students. My prior experience is shadowing other ambassadors while they give tours to other students. During this, I absorb what’s going on in the situation: what to say, what to do, and how to ask questions. I also take into account my past tours, remembering what made it successful and what could have been done to improve it. Behavior models would be the experiences of my co-workers and their tours. If they had bad tours, I would prepare myself for the possibility that I’ll get a bad tour one day as well. By knowing what to expect from bad tours, I can better prepare what to say or to do the right things. The persuasion from others would be the praise I get from my boss or co-workers for handling a bad tour with a good composure. It would soften my fear of not doing a good job on tours. Physical and emotional factors would include my stances during the tours and the openness or protected emotions that I feel in response to the tour students and families.
Brown (1999) claims that efficacy beliefs create barriers to career development and that women’s low self-efficacy beliefs reflect their limitations and disadvantages in the work place. To help boost self-efficacy, the author suggests interventions, such as, career development practices. Career development practices could take forms of contextual learning, problem-based learning, and community-based learning. In these practices, people can do self-monitoring and self-assessment to record their progress and improvement. This article provides solutions to low self-efficacy which can help to increase self-efficacy levels in all ages and genders. Reading this article also helped me to better understand other factors of self-efficacy.

Works Cited
Brown, Bettina Lankard. "Self-Efficacy Beliefs and Career Development." ERIC Digest 1999.