How do clients choose a career path? John Lees author of How to Get a Job You’ll Love, draws us a map
Approximately 9 per cent of all humans who have ever lived are alive today, according to the New York Times in January 2010.
This slice of humanity has more life choices available to it than any before. Four generations ago, the average European worker had about five to ten obvious occupations to choose from. Today, we have tens of thousands, but we don’t have the thinking tools to match.
Career coaches frequently find themselves in front of people trying to choose a completely new line of work. We have a notion of what feeds that impulse, but only a limited understanding of how clients decide which path to take.
True reasoning
The idea that people should match themselves against particular jobs is relatively new. It’s largely the result of 20th century military experience, which realised the efficiencies of aligning skills to roles. The concept was first formulated by Frank Parsons, an engineer, lawyer and maverick, who wrote books on subjects ranging from taxation to women’s suffrage to universal education. In May 1908, Parsons lectured on his new idea of systematic guidance procedures. His work, Choosing a Vocation, argued that there are three steps to selecting a career path:
- 1. A clear understanding of our “aptitudes, abilities, interests, resources, limitations and other qualities”
- 2. A knowledge of the “requirements and conditions of success, advantages and disadvantages, compensations, opportunities and prospects in different lines of work”
- 3. “True reasoning of the relations of these two groups of facts”
This framework underpins most careers work today. It rests on the idea that occupational choice is closely related to personal traits and our ability to match them with what the world offers. What’s interesting, of course, is Parsons’ quick phrase “true reasoning” – something that speaks to us of the late Victorian mindset, the optimism that any problem can be solved if we weigh up the evidence with our rational minds, like Sherlock Holmes. Yet, as we will discover, logical thinking is only modestly helpful when it comes to picking a career.
Make a decision
Just choose. It’s one of the oldest forms of careers advice. I am interested in how we actually make such choices, because they matter. In the past 40 years or so, we have had space to experiment, for example, in graduate training schemes and school-based work experience. Workers in their 20s typically try out a range of work and lifestyle options before settling down to a more focused mid-career phase.
However, this freedom to experiment is becoming increasingly curtailed by the rising burden of student debt, the costs of adult training, the disappearance of graduate training programmes and the tightening of economies.
When we choose, the first thing we do is organise into categories, a process which begins at school. You might think that subjects like history, biology and geography have been around forever, but if we still followed renaissance ideas about education you’d have attended classes entitled: thinking, speaking, imagination or wisdom. The way we codify areas of learning comes largely from the 19th century. We have invented many new categories since then – before Freud there was no Psychotherapy sector. Classroom subject thinking models career thinking: ‘I’m good at science so I should be a scientist.’
Powerful influences
This process of ‘educational funnelling’ is the basis of much of our early careers advice. You see a box with a subject label on it. The label shows things which look rather like activities you enjoyed at school. However, this approach fails to alert us to the thousands of sectors available, or to show us that very few people practise ‘pure’ geography, history or maths.
We don’t face occupational choices as a blank slate. There are powerful influences at play: parental jobs and expectations, peer pressure, the media, jobs we see as children. High status occupations hold great sway, so top graduates still aim for medicine, accountancy or law.
We believe we are making informed choices but most of us are sampling through half-closed eyes, even mid-career. We need to build better maps.
David and Fiona, two recent clients (names altered), are good examples of how we make career-focused decisions. Both were kind enough to run their decision process past me in slow motion (see How we made our choices).
Mapped out
These stages are not just about thought processes, but also mapping, confidence and lateral connections. Many people make emotional career choices (status, fear of unemployment, well-known organisations offering safety, flattery) and then dress up the decision as logical choice, rather like the way we rationalise gut-led purchasing decisions with after-the-fact thinking.
The most challenging brief for any career coach is: “I want to do something different and I’d like your help to find out what it is.” When I sit down with a new client with that opener, my first question often surprises. I ask: “How are you going to decide?”
The response you get indicates the kind of thinking your client intends to apply. Sometimes it’s along the lines of endless research, sometimes the strategy is to wait for something to present itself, or wait for the tap on the shoulder. Most of the time people believe they are reflecting and processing choices, when all they are doing is going round in circles, picking up and then shooting down ideas one after another.
We also work with the prevalent idea that the perfect job is somewhere ‘out there’, locatable through the right coach, the right exercise, or the right connection. This is evidence of the great contradiction in work – our consumer-led society believes we are entitled to a fully satisfied life, and at the same time we are increasingly unhappy at work.
Stop trying to decide. Decision-making relies on logical, A to Z thinking, which is not much use in career exploration. The client needs to put their energy into idea-building. Imagine if they were doing research for someone else – they’d keep digging – not go back and say: “I looked at a couple of things but you wouldn’t like them”. Idea building is not just imaginative, it’s concrete – drawing maps of what is out there and connecting with other people’s experience.
What’s possible?
Our risk-averse primaeval brains want to say no to change, to be ‘realistic’. Clients need to put their energy into enquiry – spinning several plates at the same time, finding out, exploring, letting go of the idea of “should I?” and hearing only “what’s possible?”
All work is a compromise between our longing and what someone else needs. Our job as career coaches is first to show our clients that we need to think differently about choices. Second, we should do our best to help clients strike a good deal, not just accept the next thing that comes along.
John Lees’ How To Get A Job You’ll Love is now available its 2011/12 edition. See www.johnleescareers.com for free career tips
David and Fiona – how we made our choices
David has just taken a job offer he is uncertain about, while Fiona is part way through a very different process
David – Route 1: Routine career change
- 1 I feel trapped in a job without choices.
- 2 I see the light at the end of the tunnel. I have a limited picture of what is out there.
- 3 I waste time trying to think about pluses and minuses, picking up ideas and then dropping them again when something puts me off.
- 4 I have a broad, slightly undefined range of options in mind.
- 5 Something comes along which is a rough match for one of these options, so I decide to take it.
Fiona – Route 2: Controlled experiment
- 1 I feel trapped in a job but I do what I can to fix the job I’m in before I turn to the job market.
- 2 I start a conscious programme of mapping, finding out what’s out there without worrying too much about whether it’s an exact fit.
- 3 I put research before job search. I keep asking questions, keep meeting interesting people.
- 4 I develop a very good map of what’s out there. I develop a range of well-researched options, so I know what I am looking at and I know how to get the job.
- 5 I meet interesting people and they remember me.
- 6 I match job offers carefully to ensure that I get at least six out of ten from my wish list before deciding.
Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 3