Tag Archives: career theory

Reflecting on your Values

Career Management Events No Comments

Welcome to Innovative Learning Week – day 4

Deciding on your preferred future career direction is often a challenging process. There will be a number of factors which will influence your conclusion, including what is important to you and what will give you satisfaction in your next role.  My colleague Lizzie Mortimer suggests an exercise to help you to reflect on your personal values and to identify which are most significant for you.

When did you last take some time to reflect on your values?

ValuesOur values play an important part in career decision making. Identifying what is important to us at a given stage in our life will help us assess whether a current or future role is a good fit for us.

In the book ‘Build your own Rainbow’ Hopson and Scally set forth an exercise to help individuals consider what their values are – and rank them in to levels of importance.

Try it for yourself:

  1. Label 5 columns: Very Important, Important, Quite Important, Of Some Importance, Not Important
  2. Using the list of values below, arrange them in to appropriate columns for you
  3. Add more values if you want to
  4. N.B. Hopson and Scally suggest that if you have more than seven or eight in the Very Important column, you haven’t been discriminating enough.
  5. You now have a tool you can use to analyse your current position or situation, and future possibilities
  6. As an extended activity, rearrange the cards the way you would have five or ten years ago – what has changed?

List of values

 

VALUE or MOTIVATOR
A well-known organisation: you like being part of a well-known organisation.
Artistic: you enjoy work involving drawing, designing, making music, making models, etc.
Being Expert: you like being known as someone with special knowledge or skills.
Challenge: you enjoy being ‘stretched’ and given new problems to work on.
Communication: you enjoy being able to express ideas well in writing or in speech.
Community: you like to live in a place where you can get involved in the community.
Competition: you enjoy competing against other people or groups.
Contact with people: you enjoy having a lot of contact with people.
Creativity: thinking up new ideas and ways of doing things is important to you.
Excitement: it is important for you to have a lot of excitement in your work.
Fast pace: you enjoy working rapidly at a high pace.
Friendship: you would or do like close friendships with people at work.
Help society: you like to think that your work is producing something worthwhile for society.
Helping others: it is important to you to help other people, either individually or in groups, as part of your work.
Independence: you like being able to work in the way you want, without others telling you what to do.
Learning: it is important for you to learn new things.
Making decisions: it is important to you to have to make decisions about how things should be done, who should do it and when it should be done.
Money: earning a large amount of money is important to you.
Peace: you prefer to have few pressures or uncomfortable demands.
Persuading people: you enjoy persuading people to buy something or change their minds about something.
Physical challenge: you enjoy doing something that is physically demanding.
Place of work: it is important that you work in the right part of the country for you.
Precise work: you like working at things which involve great care and concentration.
Pressure: you like working to deadlines.
Promotion: you like to work where there is a good chance of promotion.
Recognition: you do like people to appreciate you for the work you do.
Risk: you like to take risks.
Routine: you like a work routine which is fairly predictable.
Security: it is important to know your work will always be there for you.
Status: you enjoy being in a position which leads other people to respect you.
Supervision: you enjoy being responsible for work done by others.
Time Freedom: you prefer to be able to choose your own times for doing things, not having rigid working hours.
Variety: you enjoy having lots of different things to do.
Work alone: you like to work on your own.
Work with others: you like to work in a team alongside others.

 

This material is drawn from Build Your Own Rainbow – a workbook for career and life management by Barrie Hopson and Mike Scally, published by Management Books 2000 Ltd.

 

ã Lifeskills International 1996

Land a job in space – a fantasy or possibility?

Career Management No Comments

space

When running career planning workshops at the Edinburgh campus, we sometimes ask students to think about their ‘fantasy’ job. What type of job would they love to have if there were absolutely no barriers of any kind to hold them back?

As you can imagine this tends to elicit a wide range of replies from a leading international researcher, to travel writer, to beach café owner, to United Nations negotiator.  One career option mentioned from time to time which seems particularly topical at present is an astronaut!

I suspect that space travel will not appeal to that many of you – even if you followed Tim Peake, Britain’s first official astronaut, on his journey to the international Space Station. However, when I came across a Recruitment Grapevine article “What candidates need to land a job in space” I felt that I had to share it with you.

Aspiring space travelers will need a Bachelor’s degree (engineering, biological science, physical science, computer science, or mathematics), and at least three years-worth of related, progressively responsible, professional experience obtained after degree completion or at least 1,000 hours pilot-in-command time in a jet aircraft. They also need to be highly intelligent – the average Apollo astronaut has an IQ of 136 – and not too tall!

Inspired? You can find more at: Recruitment Grapevine

My real reason for sharing this however is that if you are rethinking your future career direction, a little time spent reflecting on your own ‘fantasy’ job could offer more than just a bit of fun. It can also be a good way to tap into what’s really important to you – what interests you, what you feel passionate about and what you value.  Thinking about yourself and your own priorities is a good first step when career planning … and perhaps your fantasy will be more realistic than you first think!

For further career planning inspiration have a look at the Careers Service website: Figuring out your career

Enjoy your fantasy!

Telling stories about yourself

Career Management No Comments
stack of books

There are many stories we could tell about our lives – what’s the story of your career?

The narrative approach to careers is about telling your career ‘story’ or narrative in order to understand yourself and make sense of your career. Your career story is your personal perspective on your working life including the objective facts, subjective emotions, attitudes and goals of your career. You could tell your career story verbally or by writing it down.

You create your career story retrospectively as a means of determining and explaining the meaning of day to day events in your life. The basic principle behind the approach is that by telling your story you can get a sense of how you’ve got where you are and how you understand your situation. When you make career choices you don’t separate these from the rest of your life; the decisions that you make are influenced by and grounded in your prior experiences and if you can tell your story it can help you to understand your concept of ‘career’ and what is possible.

The narrative approach is about more than just telling your career story though. When you tell your story it can sometimes seem disconnected, complex and difficult to make sense of. The narrative approach is about reflecting on your story, looking for clues, themes and patterns that emerge. These themes and patterns can become the basis of future stories and career possibilities. Within the narrative approach there are many questions that you can ask yourself to help you make sense of your story and to consider future possibilities. These questions can be grouped into three levels:

Level 1 – information about content and experience. This level is about getting all the details of your career story. Questions to ask yourself include: · What did you do? · What was most satisfying? · Was there anything similar about your experiences? · What skills and knowledge did you use? · What did you do to get yourself to that point?

Level 2 – connectedness and subjective experience. This level is about considering the connections between your individual experiences and the various influences on your story. Questions to ask yourself include: · Where else in your life has this been relevant? · How do you interpret that experience? · How would you explain that? · What have you learnt about yourself as a result? · What does it say about what you are capable of?

Level 3 – identification of themes and patterns. This level is about helping you to understand the important themes and patterns from your past narrative in order to help you construct a future narrative. Questions to ask yourself include: · Are there any common themes running through the experiences you have described? · What do you think will be most significant for you in moving forward? · What will be the essential components of any future options for you? · How does your understanding of your past make you view your future? · How could you move this story forward?

You can find out more about the narrative approach to careers guidance in the International Handbook of Careers Guidance or by reading Career Counselling: A Narrative Approach by Larry Cochrane