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This website informs users about Hope-Action Theory.
Research shows that strengthening hope-action competencies is useful in planning and managing your career and life effectively. Hope-Action Theory consists of the following seven competencies:
- Hopefulness: The degree of hope you have about your future.
- Self-reflection: Examining your thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, and circumstances.
- Self-clarity: Having a clear understanding about yourself in terms of interests, values, skills, motivation, goals, etc.
- Visioning: Brainstorming future possibilities for your career and identifying desired future outcomes.
- Goal Setting and Planning: The process of specifying what you want to achieve and identifying specific steps to reach your goals.
- Implementing: Taking action to achieve your goals.
- Adapting: Using new information about yourself and your environment to inform your goals and plans.
Where Hope-Action Theory is applied
Hope-Action Theory began in career development, and the research has since widened well beyond it. The publications on this site fall into five kinds of use.
- Individual career and life planning. The original setting: turning hope into deliberate action, one competency at a time.
- Organizations, workplaces and human resource development. Studies examine how organizational and supervisory support shape a hopeful career state, and how that state relates to work engagement, employee retention and turnover — in hotels, in nursing, and in vocational rehabilitation. Hope-Action Theory for organizations sets out the organizational reading of the theory (Yoon, 2020).
- Organization development and technology. Technology-leveraged OD for collective decision-making applies the framework to group decisions in organizations (Yoon et al., 2026), using video conferencing, team collaboration tools, extended reality, data analytics and generative AI. It offers six principles and a seven-step implementation process, so that every member's voice can be heard rather than only a representative group's.
- Designing and evaluating interventions. Programmes built on the theory have been delivered and evaluated with refugees in British Columbia, with unemployed clients, with internationally educated professionals, and with individuals with autism spectrum disorder.
- Education. Research links hope to student engagement, academic performance and vocational identity, and asks what helps and hinders hopefulness in students who have faced significant barriers.
The Hope-Action Inventory is what makes this practical. It turns the seven competencies into scores a person can act on, has been validated in a Korean university sample and examined in other populations, and is delivered as an online system that produces a personalised report in English, Korean, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.
Useful Links
Publications on Hope-Action Theory
How to purchase and take the Hope-Action Inventory
Books on Hope-Action Theory
