From identity to career planning

The current massive disruption of work poses increasing challenges to career planning. Wide audiences are experiencing confusion, insecurity and anxiety over their future, resembling identity crisis. The concept of identity crisis as a normative developmental stage in youth years, launched by the psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson (1980) can offer wide audiences a solution path amidst the disrupting world of work. The presented program initiates self-directed career planning, the springboard for which is the discovery of one's work identity. This creates interest, engagement and knowledge to self-directed career planning - a must for today's societies.

The program has two phases. First, the individual establishes one's work identity by identifying with most relatable "experts in work" characters. This first phase is often sufficient in arousing interest and engagement to self-directed action. As an optional continuance, the individual elaborates the work identity by taking a comprehensive, standardized test of the expert characters.

Establishing identity

The first phase in the presented career counselling program is critically important as it establishes the individual’s work identity. The person seeks and discovers his/her work identity by choosing among 20 worklife representative “Experts in work” characters those most relatable to oneself offering a preliminary answer to the identity question “Who am I at work”. Descriptions of the illustrated, socially equally desirable expert characters include their characteristic ways of behaving, thinking, viewing the world and oneself, core competencies, suitability and limitations to different educational, occupational and job specific contexts. For example, a "Quality seeker” is best suited to technical or otherwise more constrained jobs with focused responsibilities. The cost-free first phase invites the counselee to a playful, mind captivating but active effort requiring exercise and is often sufficient in initiating self-directed career planning, see: https://wopi.app/lessons/career_planners_self_guide/

Elaborating identity

In the second phase, counselees elaborate their newly established work identity with a standardized personality inventory with 224 item questions used widely in recruitment (WOPI, 2010). It yields a comprehensive, detailed and empirically validated measures on all the 20 expert characters. While the first phase includes only a few top character choices, the testing procedure lays out the entire profile on all character dimensions essentially broadening the information base. The test scores indicate dimensional strength of across the characters: which experts are most and which are least salient for the individual while standardized test scores enable comparison to other people.

Comparing the two profiles

Comparison of the self-chosen and test-produced profiles invite fruitful perusals which enhance awareness of one’s work identity and competencies. Generally, they tend to coincide thereby confirming the validity of the self made choices. But, what remains potentially informative concern the non-chosen but test-produced characters. However, in cases when the test results differ from the self-chosen expert characters, discussion arises which tends to add important information. For example, the self-chosen identity profiles occasionally tend to be influenced by social desirability, something which is controlled for already during construction of personality tests. Standardized testing can also reveal hidden expert characters and competencies that the counselee was totally unaware of. Such allround comparison strengthens the counselee's interest and dedication an example of which is occasional defending of the self-choices against test-produced results.

Neither the self-chosen nor the test-produced profile is given truth criterion status. The final definition of work identity is concluded by the individual. The program includes a so-called "work expert’s playbook” which broadens the individual's self-awareness by presenting empirical relationships between the characters and a set of well-known and well-validated neighboring concepts such as organization culture, team and leadership roles, learning styles, etc. The playbook's primary thrust to action becomes from the presented typical development challenges of each expert character. All in all, the back and forth comparison of the profiles invites lively and multifaceted, many corners illuminating perusal serving to increase the individual's awareness of work identity and competencies. The following presents brief examples where testing has produced important elaborations to work identity in young professionals.

Police officer

In regard to the earlier mentioned social desirability effects, a young police officer's character choices appeared as if copied from official brochures of police work. In terms of behavior, the counselee’s first choice character, ”Action leader” reflects assertion in social situations while the second choice, ”Communicator” is about outgoing social interaction. In planning and problem solving, the individual’s first choice, ”Practical viewer” reflects sensory based concrete perception while the second choice, ”Analytic thinker” reflects rational problem solving based on reason. Altogether, the counselee’s work identity matches well with what is expected from an ideal police officer both in behavior as well as in planning and problem solving.

The testing phase supported the self-choices in behavior as ”Action leader” attained the highest test score. However, the second highest score was on ”Advisor of others” which may be considered as even more important in police work than communication initially chosen by the counselee. However, the test scores in planning and problem solving ran counter to the self chosen characters. The highest score was on ”Idea generator” indicating that the individual approaches planning and problem solving by looking for new, unforeseen ideas (as opposed to facts). The second highest score was on ”Intuitive thinker” indicating instinct based, creative problem solutions (as opposed to rational and reasoned solutions). In summary, beside the good convergence in the behavioral domain, the counselee showed intensely creative elements in planning and problem solving which may be challenging to realize in standard, procedure bound police work.

Psychologist

Job burnout symptoms were included as one issue in the career counseling of a young psychologist working in health care. In the self-choice phase the person identified with the ”Quality seeker” character, reflecting detail orientation and perfection seeking. The counselee assumed that such a perfectionistic tendency would be the prime reason for developing burnout symptoms. The explanation is in itself logical as perfectionism is often related to etiology of burnout, in addition to situational factors.

However, the counselee’s test score on the ”Quality seeker” dimension reached only the average norm level excluding the notion of excessive perfectionism. Instead, the test score on ”Listener to others” reached a level where an individual tends to abandon one's own interests in favor of serving others’ (presumed) needs. In the norms, only six individuals in hundred receive the same or higher score. Unquestioned listening to others, settling oneself to serving others’ needs point to the counselee overidentifying with patient suffering which may be the real reason for the work burnout symptoms. Unquestioned identification with patient suffering is not rare among care professionals nor is it appropriate in realizing treatment goals.

HR professional

The third example comes from a situation where the test reveals a competency which the counselee was only faintly or not at all aware of. The individual works in a smaller organization as a HR generalist responsible for multifaceted, daily changing practical duties. The individual expressed dissatisfaction with the job without being able to specify reasons for this.

The testing displayed a high score on the ”Complex viewer” dimension which means that the person perceives things on a highly abstract level. As opposed to ”Practical viewers” they tend to perceive things by contextualization and seeking for broader and deeper-probing pictures of things. Instead of tackling with daily changing practical duties the counselee could use the broad, complex perception competency better in planning centered HR jobs, dealing with research and HR policy-level issues. This piece of information came as a surprise although the counselee had expressed interest in pursuing further education on top of the current academic degree.

Conclusion

While the first, critical identity establishing phase often appears sufficient in sparking self-directed action, the testing and profile comparison procedures facilitated by a trained professional produces a powerful boost to self-awareness and self-directed career development.