From identity to career planning

The current massive disruption of work poses increased challenges to career planning. Wide audiences are experiencing confusion, insecurity and anxiety over their future. Career planning is becoming no less a challenge than search for identity in the new world. The concept of identity crisis as part of development in youth launched by the psychoanalyst Erik H. Eriksonin (1980) appears to depict feelings of wider audiences amidst the change. The following program initiates self-directed career planning getting its springboard from the discovery of one's work identity. This creates interest, engagement and knowledge to developing one's career and competence.

The program has two phases beginning from establishing one's work identity. This phase is often sufficient in arousing interest and engagement to self-directed action. As optional continuance the counselee takes a standardized test to elaborate one's identity, see below.

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 work life 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 challenges in relation to different educational, occupational and job contexts. For example, “a Quality seeker” is best suited to technical or otherwise more constrained jobs with focused responsibilities. The cost-free first identity establishing phase invites the counselee to a playful, mind captivating but active effort requiring exercise and is often sufficient to initiate individuals’ self-directed career planning, see: https://wopi.app/lessons/career_planners_self_guide/

Elaborating identity

In the second phase, counselees elaborate their established work identity through a standardized personality inventory with 224 questions and 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 whole profile on all twenty character dimensions essentially broadening the information base. Test scores indicate dimensional strength of across the characters: which experts are most and which are least salient in the individual’s profile. Standardized scores enable comparison with other people.

Comparing the identitity profiles

Comparison of the self-chosen and test-produced profiles invites fruitful eying enhancing awareness of one’s work identity and competencies. Generally they tend to coincide across the choices thereby confirming the validity of the self made choices. What remains potentially informative concerns the non-chosen but test-produced characters. However, when the test results differ from the self-chosen expert characters, discussion arises which tend to add important information. For example, social desirability effects occasionally influence the self-chosen identity profiles something which are controlled for in construction of personality tests. Standardized testing can also reveal hidden expert characters and competencies that the counselee was totally unaware of. The comparison process appears intriguing for the counselee as such, one curious finding is occasional defending of the self-choices against test-produced results which obviously enhances the counselee’s understanding of identity.

Neither the self-chosen nor the test-produced profile is given truth criterion status. The final definition of work identity is concluded by the counselee. The counselees also have access to the ”Work expert’s playbook” with deeper and broader coverage of the expert character’s development challenges and relations to established measures of neighboring concepts such as team roles, coping and learning styles, organizational culture, etc. All in all, the back and forth comparison of the profiles invites lively and multifaceted, many corners illuminating perusal which serves in increasing the counselee's awareness of work identity and core work competencies. The following presents brief examples of cases where the testing phase has produced important elaboration of work identity in young professionals.

Police officer

In regard to social desirability effects, a young police officer's character choices appeared as if copied from official brochures of police work. In behavior, the counselee’s first choice character, ”Action leader” is about assertion in social situations. The second choice, ”Communicator” is about outgoing social interaction. In planning and problem solving, the individual’s first choice, ”Practical viewer” reflects concrete, sensory based perception. The second choice ”Analytic thinker” reflects rational, reasoned problem solving. 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 activity.

The testing phase supported 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. But, 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 instinctual, creative problem solutions (as opposed to rational, reasoned solutions). In summary, beside the good convergence in behavior 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 an issue in career counseling of a young psychologist working in health care. In the self-choice phase the person identified with a ”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, perfectionism is often related to etiology of burnout, in addition to situational factors.

However, the counselee’s test score on the ”Quality seeker” 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’ (perceived) needs. In the norms, only six individuals in hundred receive the same or higher score on the dimension. Unquestioned listening to others and settling oneself to serving others’ needs point to the counselee overidentifying with patient suffering which may be the real reason for the burnout symptoms. Unquestioned identification with patient suffering is not infrequent 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 it.

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 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 and critical work identity establishing phase often appears sufficient in sparking self-directed action, the testing and comparison procedures facilitated by a trained professional produces a powerful boost to self-directed career development. On top of a few hundred completed career counseling cases on working professionals, Tallinn University began offering the program as part of their student services.