Career Self-Management in the New World of Work

Marlowe C. Embree, Ph.D.

Senior Lecturer in Psychology, UWMC

The world of work has changed more in your lifetime than in the 150 years preceding your birth.  If you try to engage in career planning by yesterday's rules, don't be surprised to discover that you're obsolete before you begin.

Here are a few wake-up statistics for you:

• The average twentysomething entering the job market for the first time this year can expect, on average, 9 to 13 job changes in a working lifetime.  (Put differently:  the average job in America now lasts only 3.6 years.)  Those are projected median figures, which means that 50% of you can expect more job changes than that.
• These figures include something completely unimaginable only a generation ago:  an average of 3 to 5 radical career shifts within a working lifetime.  By "radical career shift" is meant a complete redefinition of your vocational self... from CPA to fighter pilot to neurosurgeon to bungee jumping instructor to U.S. Senator.
• Over 7 of 10 Americans say that they would change jobs tomorrow if wishing could make it so.  Moral:  most people apparently expect a lot more out of work than they're receiving... possibly because lots of us choose careers nearly at random.

Here are some of the ways the world of work has changed since 1977 (a mere quarter-century ago):

• Competition is now global, not local.  Not so long ago, businesses mainly had to compete with the company down the street.  Now they have to compete with the company half a world away.  Guess what this means for your job security?  As one wit put it, "The American dream is alive and well!  It's just been relocated to northern India."
• Customers are exponentially more fickle.  A quarter century ago, advertisers still spoke bravely about "brand loyalty".  Now, people use the power of the Internet (yep, Bill Gates is responsible for a lot of these trends) to shop everything, which means that it's harder and harder to predict the future by extrapolating from the past.
• Job security is dead.  The old work paradigm (which probably reached its peak two generations ago, but which still governed people's thinking as recently as 20 years ago) was, in essence, one of trading loyalty for security.  You'd sell your soul to the company store, receiving in return a job for life and a fat pension.  Now, it's not that unusual for people to arrive for work on their first day to find that they've already been downsized:  "Here's where your office would have been."  The new paradigm is one of trading problem solving ability for enhanced marketability.  More about that later.
• Life balance is harder to find, though it's higher on people's wish lists than ever before.  In a 24/7, instant-turnaround economy, companies can't always afford to let you have a personal life.  Technology has made it impossible to take a real vacation;  many high level executives take their cell phones with them even into the shower.  Burnout and workaholism are rampant.
• A new two-tiered society may be emerging, in which the "haves" are the information workers ("symbolic analysts" in Robert Reich's terminology) and the "have nots" are the routine production and service workers.  This bodes well for the future of higher education (deep sigh of relief), though as Christopher Lasch notes, it has some other unpleasant side effects, such as the fact that the "haves" increasingly inhabit a virtual, synthetic world almost wholly divorced from what used to be called reality.
• Effective work has to be both high-tech and high-touch even though few people are equally skilled at both.  Consider the technological changes that have taken place within, if not your lifetime, then  mine:  50 years ago, slide rules were high tech;  all telephones were corded;  the few computers in existence were the size of a whole room, yet had less computing power than most pocket calculators do today.  (More recently:  10 years ago there were a total of 70 Web sites in the whole world;  today there are well over a million times that.)  Yet, if mishandled, all these technical marvels can make people feel isolated and dehumanized:  think "voice mail" if you don't get the point.

In a world like that, how do you survive and thrive?  By majoring on six key qualities that will take on an increasingly make-or-break quality in the next 25 years!  Here they are.  (How do I know that these qualities will still be important in 2027?  I don't, not for sure.  But the smart money is on these propositions.  They represent logical projections, not a telepathic interface:  I almost had a psychic girlfriend once, but she broke up with me before we met.)

1.  Portability

Portability means "have skills, will travel" (if you know the classic TV show to which this refers, you are uncomfortably close to my age, and should start subscribing to Morbidity and Mortality Monthly).  It means that you have a set of marketable problem-solving skills that you keep sharp and polished, so you'll always be in demand.  In a world in which job security no longer exists, the key to continued employment is to know what your best skills are, so you can get better and better at them over time (see next paragraph) and can shuffle and reshuffle your skills deck to fit a variety of different job opportunities.  It means, in other words, that you look beyond your job title, or your present career objective, to get in touch with the unique, irreplaceable person that you are.

A few words about skills: 

• Know your strengths, because you'll want to focus on them, and you can't do that if you don't know what they are.  Psychologists and managerial types may not agree on much, but they agree on this:  as Peter Drucker put it, "it's much easier to move from competence to excellence than it is to move from mediocrity to competence".  In other words, build on your strengths, rather than wasting energy trying to shore up your weaknesses.
• But don't overdo it to the point that you become a one-sided, cardboard-cutout caricature of a person.  Have some counterbalancing strengths and some fallback skills.  Specialization is great -- up to a point.  But if you learn more and more about less and less until finally you know everything about nothing, you'd better already be tenured.

One career expert calls portability "knowing what's in your backpack" -- meaning your storehouse of abilities, knowledge, skills, and marketable traits that you carry with you from job to job.  Think of this as your "transition survival kit" -- and you'll need one (9 to 13 job changes, remember?) eventually, because even the best employer in the world is not your mommy.  Humanly speaking, you'll have to take care of yourself:  portability means enhancing your capability to do just that.

2.  Diversification

In her classic work The Way of the Ronin, Beverly Potter uses the Oriental game of "go" (in which players capture territory by placing stones on a game board that looks like a giant piece of graph paper) as an analogy to illustrate the merits of diversification.  If one player places all of his stones in one area of the board, and his opponent makes the same number of moves but scatters the stones widely across the board, the second player (all things being equal) is almost guaranteed to win.  Moral:  don't focus too narrowly.  If you can only sing one tune, your name had better be Celine Dion.

Diversification means that you simultaneously develop from 3 to 5 generalizable, transferable skill sets.  (Mine are teaching/training, counseling/consulting, writing, and... a distinct fourth... Web development.)  Keys to effective diversification:

• Pick skill sets that are different, yet rationally related.  In this way, getting better at any one of them pays dividends in all of them, and the audiences (markets!) that care about one of them have some chance of also finding the others relevant.
• Pick skill sets that represent natural gifts.  Your best transferable skills probably started emerging by the time you were 5 or 6 years old.  So if you're stuck, ask yourself, "What were you good at in grade school?"  Skill at picking on the teacher, for instance, suggests a career in politics.

Diversification means never having to say you're sorry (that a particular career field dried up for you), because you can always switch to Plan B.  It's in this spirit that Martin Yate says that smart people have three careers going at the same time:  one that pays the bills now, one that has a rational chance of paying the bills tomorrow, and one just for fun (what you've always wanted to do, what you love so much that you'd do it for free, your "dream career").

3.  Entrepreneurship

When career experts tell you to "think like an entrepreneur", it doesn't mean that you should vote yourself some hefty stock options.  It means that you need to remember that all forms of making a living have to be cost-justified -- your paycheck is not an entitlement, but the natural outgrowth of someone (a customer) being satisfied enough with something (a desired product or service) that s/he will part with cold, hard cash in return for it, and that your benefit to your employer (in the form of demonstrated problem-solving, that is, profit-generating, ability) is greater than your cost (the paycheck).

So you need to be asking yourself:

• Who are your customers?  In the classroom, you are my customers.  That doesn't mean you can "purchase" an A, but if you try, please use unmarked bills only, with no consecutive serial numbers;  small denominations are best.
• What defines your niche (that is, your product-service mix)?  That is, what exactly are you offering, and more importantly, why would anyone want it?  (That is, what unmet need does it address?)  Please note that this includes a clear understanding of what you are not in the business of doing, because no one can be all things to all people.  Some business niches just can't be rationally combined, as in the famous case of the Marriage and Family Institute and Fast Food Emporium, featuring a drive-through counseling window ("would you like fries with that?")
• Who are your competitors?  There are some, believe me.  If not, either (a) you are so far ahead of the market that you have no customers yet, or (b) you are so far behind the market that you have no customers any more.  Whether you are the former (booking agency for transgalactic flights) or the latter (buggy whip manufacturer), there's no living in it.  Know who your competition is, so you can be better than -- or at least different from -- them.  This may mean a gimmick, like the sanitary engineer whose truck proudly declared, "Your satisfaction guaranteed or double your garbage back!"

4.  Buoyancy

Buoyancy, or resilience, means the ability to bounce back from hard times, to survive a career drought, to see the possibility rather the threat side of change, to keep growing and learning and developing, to make lemons out of lemonade, to see meaning rather than meaninglessness in the patterns of your life.  It is as much of an attitude as a skill, as much art as science.  It's also, according to reputable research, the best statistical predictor of such desirable traits as longevity, mental health, and even career success.  It begins by abandoning irrational ideas such as "the world owes me a living".  It means investing in something higher than yourself.  It means, as Lasch puts it, affirming the essential truth that the secret of happiness lies in relinquishing the right to be happy.  (Think about it.)

5.  Balance

Work in our culture is about three things:

• Making a living:  paying the bills, saving for retirement, keeping the wolf (or other assorted carnivores) from the door.  Money, however, is not the scorecard of success:  it's the side dish, not the entree.  (Doubt me?  Watch Biography on the A&E Network and see how many rich, thin, famous, and miserable people there are out there.  Makes me glad to be poor, fat, obscure... and riotously content.  The Psalmist puts it like this:  "You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound.")
• Making a life:  that is, a lifestyle -- a way of spending or structuring time.  Think hard about this one, because money is gained by making lifestyle sacrifices (working when you'd rather be playing, traveling when you'd rather be staying at home, toeing the company line when you'd rather be an iconoclast).  Life is about tradeoffs, so know what you're willing to trade away -- versus what you'll give up only when it's pried out from between your cold, dead fingers.
• Making a difference:  your mission, your purpose, your psychological legacy.  One way to get in touch with this (though it may seem a bit morbid at first) is to write your own "best-case eulogy" or obituary.  For what do you want to be remembered after you're gone?  This may be one of the most important questions you ever ask yourself.  As Lily Tomlin puts it, "I always wanted to be somebody, but now I see that I should have been more specific."

6.  Connectivity

"No man is an island," wrote John Donne in one of his most famous lines.  (The other memorable one summarizes the course of his love life:  "John Donne / Anne Donne / undone.")  We all need each other:  we're inescapably interdependent.

What does this mean for you?  Among other things, it provides you with a reason for caring about other people, if the fact that that's the right thing to do is insufficient motivation for you:  because the best place to be when you're out of a job is for all the world's power brokers to owe you a giant favor.  In contrast, if the only time you call your friends is when you want something out of them, guess what happens to your reputation?  (And this matters, believe me:  as Warren Buffett puts it, it takes twenty years to build a reputation, but only five minutes to ruin one.)

Connectivity matters because you can't do everything, and you need to swap favors with others who are weak where you're strong (and vice versa).  It matters because people hire people whom they know and trust (or who are known and trusted by people they know and trust).  It matters because people who need people are the luckiest people in the world, or at least in the job market.  This holds for introverts as well as extraverts;  the good news is that you can connect with anyone around the world via email without leaving your home or office. 

So what's a career planner to do?

So, here you are, a college student (or Web lurker) who is trying to plan for your first career... in a world in which your first career will almost certainly not be your last.  To make things worse, there are too many choices!  A mere century ago, if you were female, you would have been expected to become a wife and mother, and if you didn't marry, there were about five occupations open to you.  If you were male, you would have been expected to follow in your father's footsteps, which for 95% of you would have meant becoming a self-employed small farmer.  Now, fast forward to today... there are (according to our beloved federal government) some 16,000 distinct job titles in existence (and that doesn't include those too new to have hit the feds' radar screen).  Making a rational choice among 16,000 options... now that's a tall order!

A good approach -- which provides focus without sacrificing flexibility for the future -- is to "fractionate", which means to identify the specific puzzle pieces of a good career for you, then research career choices that meet those criteria.  Two kinds of criteria are internal (having to do with you-the-person) and external (having to do with the job market and the economic landscape).  In this essay, I'll be focusing on the internal factors, but don't forget the equally important externals, which include:

• How much money you can expect to make (versus how much you want or need);  again, don't neglect this, but if you make this your sole or your primary consideration, you'll end up rich but miserable (for only 50% of your net worth, I can teach you how to be happy!)
• What lifestyle considerations are implied by the occupation:  where you'll end up living (most editors are in New York, most country singers in Nashville, most movie stars in Hollywood, most nuclear physicists in Halder), how many hours you'll work, how much travel you'll be doing, whether you'll work for a large or a small company
• Supply and demand (how easily you'll be able to find a job), as well as the "half-life" of your chosen career (so you don't become obsolete too soon)

Now for the internal considerations, which will occupy most of my attention as a psychologist, and most of your attention as a readership/audience.  There are four major kinds of puzzle pieces to be considered:

• Skills:  what you do well
• Interests:  what you enjoy doing
• Motivators:  what keeps you doing it
• Style:  what makes you unique as a worker

Good (that is, satisfying) jobs match who you are in these four areas.  Bad (that is, depressing) jobs don't.  It's as simple as that.  Let's take a look at each area.

Skills

Skills come in two flavors, technical and transferable.  Technical skills represent job-specific information you acquired in some formal or informal way:  in school, on the job, through self-education of some sort.  While important, these are the smaller slice of the skills pie because they are easy to obtain:  just take a class, accept an internship or apprenticeship, read a book, surf the Net, whatever.  Transferable skills are more important because they (by definition) transcend the job-title box:  they're your set of natural gifts that you carry with you wherever you go.  Your transferable skills represent those things you do best and most easily:  usually, they are action verbs (see examples below).

There are four general categories of transferable skills:  skills with things (building, repairing, maintaining, operating);  skills with ideas (analyzing, researching, creating, envisioning);  skills with people (teaching, counseling, managing, motivating);  and skills with data/details (budgeting, organizing, computing, allocating).  From this brief description, can you identify your strongest area of the four?  Your weakest?

I have some skill checklists I'll bring to the seminar.  But for now, try dividing a sheet of paper into three columns.  In the left hand column, list some things you do magnificently.  In the middle column, identify some things you do adequately.  In the right hand column, be honest about those things you should never be allowed to do without adult supervision.  What have you learned about yourself from this exercise?

Interests

Ideally, work should be indistinguishable from play, except that work comes with direct deposit.  Work should be fun:  if your career isn't a source of pleasure to you at least 70% of the time, either (a) you're in the wrong field or (b) you're struggling with depression (either due to external workplace realities like a lousy boss or the threat of a pink slip, or due to personal issues in your life).  

The granddaddy of all psychological models of career interests is John Holland's circumplex model.  (If you know what a circumplex is, you may already be a statistician.)    Here are his six categories:  can you identify your top three?  Your lowest (which may tell you what kinds of jobs to avoid)?

• Realistic:  working with your hands, tools, machinery, equipment, or physical work (machinist, forklift operator, farmer, police officer)
• Investigative:  working with ideas in an analytical fashion, with an emphasis on scientific or technical occupations (wildlife biologist, electrical engineer, pathologist, statistician)
• Artistic:  working with ideas in a way that emphasizes creative self-expression (journalist, actor, floral designer, gourmet chef)
• Social:  people-helping occupations whether people contact is direct or indirect (teacher, counselor, social worker, religious leader)
• Enterprising:  occupations that involve group leadership, management, entrepreneurship, or persuasion (branch manager, salesperson, labor arbitrator, school administrator)
• Conventional:  occupations that emphasize precision and accuracy in the management of details, often quantitative details (accountant, actuary, financial analyst, executive secretary)

Each category has some unique mindsets and approaches to tasks;  for instance, scientists (primarily Investigative) tend to be "professional undergeneralizers".  Note that to some extent, R and S are opposites, as are I and E, and A and C:

• R types have the least interest in involvements with other people, S the most
• I types are the most theoretical or abstract, E the most pragmatic or concrete
• A types are the most unstructured or autonomy-driven, C the most structured or security-driven

Can you identify your "three letter Holland code"?  (Mine is S-I-A, typical for an academic:  S for the people side of the work, I for the theoretical side, A for the lame humor.)

Motivators

What gets you out of bed in the morning?  (Besides an alarm clock.)  What defines a good job for you, in terms of rewards (other than financial) that you seek from your work?  Edgar Schein suggests that there are eight basic, core motivators -- "career anchors", he calls them.  Most of us consider one or two of these to be non-negotiable motivators, things we'd give up only as an absolute last resort (and only at the price of being miserable).  Can you spot your top two?  Your least motivating (which may actually mean something you find aversive)?

• Security and stability:  This person primarily seeks a job s/he "won't lose" (and/or that provides geographic stability) even if pay or advancement must be sacrificed.
• Technical competence:  This person primarily seeks to become a content expert, to know the 80% of a given field that nobody else can be bothered to learn, to dig deep.
• Managerial expertise:  This person wants to have an increasing scope of organizational responsibility, to climb the ladder of success.  
• Autonomy:  This person seeks to be free to do things her/his own way, to avoid constraints and needless rules and (above all) micromanagement.  
• Entrepreneurship:  This person wants to run her/his own show, and is probably not going to be content for long working for anyone else.
• Service and altruism:  This person wants to make a difference, to leave the world a better place than when s/he entered it, to impact others' needs.
• Pure challenge:  This person doesn't care what s/he does for a living as long as it is almost impossible to succeed.  The tougher the challenges faced at work, the better.
• Lifestyle balance:  For this person, work is a slice of life's pie, but never the whole pie.  The idea is to maintain a balance between work and nonwork priorities (family, friends, hobbies, reruns of Mannix).

The moral?  If your employer doesn't reward you in the right (psychological) currency for you, you'll be dissatisfied and will probably eventually move on.

Style (aka Personality or Temperament)

Most of you, being my students, either have already heard of the Big Five model of personality, or else were asleep at the switch.  If you don't remember what that's about, please click here, but quietly.  

Now that you know (or have reviewed) what these five dimensions are about, here's what they mean for your career decision making:

• Extraversion informs you about how much time on the job you want to spend interacting with others, versus working by yourself.  Do you do your best work in the outer world or in the inner world?  Do you best decide by talking things out or by thinking them through?  Which is more draining:  excessive enforced sociability or excessive enforced solitude?  Jobs differ widely on these variables.
• Openness informs you about whether you want the end-product of your work to be something long-range and intangible (a set of ideas, concepts, theories, strategies, visions) or something short-range and tangible (a concrete product or service).  It's no surprise, for instance, that most academics are O+, while most business managers are O-.  Are you a thinker or a doer (as your fundamental default mode)?
• Agreeableness informs you about whether competition or cooperation is your fundamental way of dealing with people.  A- types seek positions that involve high levels of confrontation and internal competition (trial lawyers), while A+ types seek positions that involve high levels of cooperation and a search for the win-win (counselors).  A- types tend to be more analytical (work with impersonal entities -- machines, spreadsheets, concepts), A+ types more empathic (work with people, or other important sentient beings such as cats, and their problems and needs).
• Conscientiousness informs you about your ideal work environment (low vs. high structure) as well as how you handle decisions.  C+ types need structure and enjoy making (or efficiently implementing) decisions.  C- types need autonomy and find deadline pressure a source of untold misery.  I'd write more about this topic, but I keep putting it off.
• Negative Emotionality informs you about the level of stress you seek (and/or can handle) on the job.  Jobs that put you on the firing line require N-.  Jobs that require you to be able to verbalize mood states require N+.  Airline pilots, for instance, should not be N+ ("This is your captain speaking.  Commence panicking.")

Taking it to the streets

Having gotten clear about your career specifications, which should look like this (these happen to be mine):

• Strengths with Ideas (conceptualizing, theorizing, synthesizing, researching, writing, creating) and People (teaching, training, counseling, consulting, listening)
• Social, Investigative, Artistic
• Autonomy, Service and Altruism, Technical Competence;  Lifestyle Balance also in the top half
• E- O+ A+ C-;  N score withheld pending notification of next of kin

... your mission (if you choose to accept it) then becomes to research career options that fit this profile (and also meet your external criteria as briefly noted above).  Remember that good career planning always involves a balance between two stages:

• An exploration phase (which is divergent, that is, possibility-generating) in which you explore as many options (live or in your head) as you can;
• A commitment phase (which is convergent, that is, possibility-excluding) in which you sift and winnow and eventually choose and commit to a specific option.

People who bypass the first phase suffer from premature role commitment:  they look as if they have it all together until they reach age 35 or so, and then they have the midlife crisis to end all midlife crises because they never let themselves ask the "what else might I do?" question.  People who get stuck in the first phase suffer from role diffusion:  they never quite get around to doing anything, and drift through life as perpetual students, job hoppers, or federal employees.  Don't let either happen to you:  the idea is to walk the tightrope between these two catastrophic errors.  As C.S. Lewis once wrote, the devil always sends us errors in pairs of opposites, hoping that in our zeal to avoid one, we will fall headlong into the other.  Which mistake are you more prone to make?

Your career essay

In a three-page paper, summarize your current career plans, and include information that convinces me that you have engaged in some reality-testing of your career goal.  This could include an informational interview with someone currently involved in that career, material from Do What You Are (on reserve in the library), and/or an analysis of your skills, interests, motivators, and style as related to that career.  I'll be providing you with a number of additional resources in the next few weeks during class.  Stay tuned for them.

Career Readiness Inventory

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