Career guidance and counseling in the western world, most notably in the United States, has developed a comprehensive system of theories and intervention strategies in its more than 100 years of history. It began in the years of Frank Parson as a trait-factor approach in the early twentieth century, and slowly evolved to become a rather mature discipline today in the twenty-first century with a strong theoretical and empirical base, with the potential to further develop into a more “global” discipline in the years ahead. Indeed, vocational and career related issues are salient across different cultures and nationalities. In an age of economic globalization, all individuals are affected by an array of work related concerns, some of these concerns are unique to certain cultures, but others are common to many cultural groups. The search for life purposes and meanings, the journey to actualize oneself through various life and work-related roles, and the efforts by nations to deal with problems of employment and unemployment, are examples of universal issues that seem to affect many individuals from diverse cultures. Under the theme of career development, there are experiences, concerns, and issues that we could share, explore, and discussed at a global stage. The development of career guidance and development into a global discipline requires a set of theoretical frameworks with universal validity and applications, as well as culture-specific models that could be used to explain career development issues and phenomenon at a local level. The focus of this paper is four of the five theories of career development that have guided career guidance and counseling practice and research in the past few decades in the USA as well as internationally. These four theories are Theory of Work-Adjustment, Social Cognitive Career, Gottfredson’s Theory of Circumscription and Compromise, and Theory Holland’s Theory of Vocational Personalities in Work Environment. All these theories will be discussed in detail through this paper. They will also have examples to help furthermore understand them. Theory of Work Adjustment The Theory of Work Adjustment (TWA) is a class of theory in career development that is anchored on the individual difference tradition of vocational behavior called person environment correspondence theory, viewing career choice and development as continual processes of adjustment and accommodation in which: (a) the person(P) looks for work organizations and environments (E) that would match his/her“requirements” in terms of needs, and (b) E in turn looks for individuals who have the capabilities to meeting the “requirements” of the organization. The term satisfaction is used to indicate the degree that P is satisfied with E, and satisfactoriness is used to denote the degree that E is satisfied with P. To P, the most central requirements to meet from E are his/her needs (or reinforces), which could be further dissected into categories of psychological and physical needs that are termed values. To E, however, the most central requirements are abilities, which are operationalized as dimensions of skills that P possesses that are considered necessary in a given E. Overall, the degree of P’s satisfaction and E’s satisfactoriness would jointly predict P’s tenure in that work environment. Recent formulations of TWA speculated on the effects of diverse adjustment styles that could be used to explain how P and E continuously achieve and maintain their correspondence. Four adjustment style variables are identified, which are flexibility, activeness, reactiveness, and perseverance. Flexibility refers to P’s level of tolerance to P-E dis-correspondence and whether he/she has a tendency to become easily dissatisfied with E. Activeness refers to whether P has a tendency to actively change or act on E to reduce dis-correspondence and dis-satisfaction. Reactiveness, conversely, refers to whether P would resort to self-adjustment in order to deal with dis-correspondence without actively changing or acting on E. Meanwhile, perseverance refers to P’s degree of resolve and persistence to adjust and accommodate before choosing to exit E. Similar adjustment styles also influence E’s approach to deal with dis-correspondence and dis-satisfactoriness (Renfro-Michel, 2009). Career choice and development is thus conceptualized as a continual process or cycles of work adjustment initiated by dis-satisfaction and dis-satisfactoriness. A major strength of TWA is that a battery of measures has been developed to measure the various variables associated with the theory, including measures on satisfaction, needs and values, skills and abilities, satisfactoriness, and indexes of correspondence. A large number of research studies have been conducted in the last few decades to examine the propositions derived from TWA, especially on the linkage between needs/abilities and satisfaction/satisfactoriness, and between wor