Navigating our careers
Career transition is not always a linear process, instead it may consist of a number of small incremental steps. These steps may follow a less predictable sequence as we navigate our careers and work to achieve our long-term desired outcomes and goals.
Career choices are informed by multiple internal and external factors and thinking about how the mentoring conversations can support mentees to consider career options and professional development opportunities may consist of several interrelated topic areas. It's often useful to think through and consider the following factors:
- Identity: past, present and future
- Environment: understanding and navigating context
- Research: information and knowledge
- Decision making: enabling informed choices and thinking through decision making strategies
- Intention: commitment to make a change
Identity: past, present, the future
Professor Herminia Ibarra has spent many years researching career and identity transition. She is the author of act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader and Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Ibarra (2004: 18) and suggests that our working identity is defined by:
- What we do, the professional activities that engage us.
- The company we keep, our working relationships and our professional networks to which we belong.
- The formative events in our lives and the store that links who we have been to who we will become.
Ibarra (2004) suggests a number of strategies for reworking identity, all of which may be considered within the context of the mentoring relationship:
- Trying out new activities, new roles on a small scale to begin with to make the transition to a large-scale change.
- Analysing current professional networks, reflecting on our needs, seeking opportunities to expand our networks informed by the analysis.
- Finding catalysts for change to enable us to create new stories, continually develop our identity and career.
When considering the past, you may want to start with the creation of a career genogram, it is a technique frequently used in careers coaching. It is one of many tools and techniques described by Julia Yates (2019) in her Career Coaching Toolkit. A career genogram is a family tree of careers, involving mapping out family members and their occupations. This is a useful exercise to identify any patterns and themes that are relevant today. It is possible to go back two or three generations. It can inform thinking patterns, values, decision-making, and the degree of perceived risk. In the mentoring conversation you can also explore the career story, what led you to where you are today, what are the formative experiences and pivotal moments.
Once we have greater self-insight, self-knowledge, we can then think about the present and the future. In the mentoring conversation, you might explore ‘the middle’ or ‘the neutral zone’ where we are yet to transition. What are the tentative steps that might be taken to create a shift from the present to the future? Imagining the future, our possible selves. In the mentoring conversations, developing a picture of what the future might look like. Imagine taking on new roles and projects, connecting with new people, repacking our CV/resume. Questions to explore the future might include:
- Tell me about your future?
- Where are you working?
- What do you find fulfilling about your work?
- Who are you working with?
- What do working relationships look like?
- What is different to today from the current you?
- How do others see you?
- How do you feel about going to work in the morning?
The environment: research, information and knowledge
In order to make an informed decision, we need information and knowledge. This involves self-insight and outsight:
- Self-insight: gathering information and gaining knowledge about our current and future selves: values, attributes, strengths, preferences, circumstances.
- Outsight: gathering information and gaining knowledge to navigate the context, knowing what is out there, in the ecosystem.
- Navigating the environment not only involves research, gaining information and new knowledge, it also involves connecting with others to enhance and expand our networks to gain greater outsight and insight into careers, industries and sectors.
Decision making
Yates (2019: 33) suggests that career decisions are informed by several connected themes. Considering each themes individually and then as a whole can help to inform career transitions:
- Task variety – degree of variety
- Colleagues – like-minded people, shared goals, and commitment
- Working conditions – physical and psychological
- Workload – balancing well-being
- Autonomy – the extent to which you have control
- Educational and development opportunities – opportunities for growth and development
- Congruence – values, identity, authenticity, strengths
It may feel overwhelming to consider and prioritise all seven themes. A useful exercise to assist in prioritising the themes in the change balloon. The steps are as follows.
- Draw a hot air balloon with seven or more sandbags which represent each theme or aspects within each theme. Draw as many sandbags as you wish.
- You have sandbags in the basket, the balloon is losing air, so you have to release a sandbag, one at a time.
- Working through each of the 7 aspects, consider which you would remove first, what is least important?
- This becomes your priority list to help make an informed decision.
Commitment to make the change
In the mentoring conversation, you may want to shift to a practical focus, how to make change happen:
- Focusing on change, having a ‘change talk’ can help to shift our intention.
- The change talk focuses on the change or action that is needed to make a transition.
- Having a conversation about the positives relating to the change.
- Picture yourself 2 years from now, what does the future look like?
- On a scale of 1 – 10, how likely are you to take action? What action and when?
Ibarra (2004) suggests we can learn and develop through experimentation:
- Side projects
- Temporary assignments
- Back to school
- A Steering Group, Advisory Body