Part III of this essay explores organisation-external communications, how to engage the world out there to impact how your peers think and act, how this process shapes our identity and what we might become. It forms part of research into my next book on organisational and human sensemaking. 

Part III introduces two broad mental models for career evolution that reflect the experience of this community, and considers the wide range of experiences that affect a career. 

Read Part I, Part II and Part IV of this essay, with a sidebar on ‘luck’. Part IV will be announced via the Radar mailing list.

Part III Contents

• I. Career path mental models
• Career breaks
• The evolution of a traditional, directional career path
• ‘Retirement’
• II. The experiences that shape a career
  • Moments
  • Events
  • Phases
  • The interrelatedness of experiences
  • Achieving a preferred outcome
  • Motivational intent
  • A personal inventory of experiences
• III. Summary and  what’s next
• References

 

I. Career path mental models

As part of the Reflecting Forward Fellowship I’ve spoken with dozens of members of our internationally dispersed community about their careers. At a high level they lean towards one of two mental models for their career path: directional or correlative (Figure 1).  

FIGURE 1. Career Path Mental models

We can think of these as:

• Directional, working towards clear goals usually defined by an established organisation or industry, often focussed on hierarchical attainment such as job title, compensation and benefits.
  
  
• Correlative, seeking out experiences that align to their values and general ‘sense of self’, accepting opportunities as they arise, often driven by intrinsic motivations such as contentment or an overarching sense of values driven purpose. They ascribe meaning to a wide range of life experiences that affect their career.

Directional mental models typically measure success against extrinsically set success criteria that are easily measurable and comparable to their peers, and the goal is simple: to move up.

With correlative mental models “success” is defined intrinsically, and is more difficult to measure and compare—the Y-axis shown as a dotted line. The criteria to evaluate “success” vary from person to person, and are more likely to include the lessons learned from negative experiences.

The mental model that a person adopts—directional, correlative or something else, is often shaped by their upbringing—particularly parental expectations, updated through lived experience, and workplace norms.

Readers familiar with career path literature can map these against well-documented research such as a traditional, boundaryless (Arthur, et al, 2005), or protean (Hall, 2002) career path mental models .

Career breaks

All career paths accommodate intermittent career breaks, and these tend to fall into two camps: voluntary e.g. a sabbatical or taking time off before starting a new job, or enforced e.g. being laid off (Figure 2), or due to prolonged illness.

FIGURE 2. A career break after being laid off

People whose career is central to their identity have a tendency to rationalise being laid off, in terms of being unwilling to ‘play corporate politics’ or as a result of ‘sticking to their values’. This mental framing enables them to maintain a coherent self-narrative, even when its correlation to their actual situation might be tenuous. 

There are differences in how an enforced career break is viewed. After being laid off, someone with a directorial mental model is more likely to view the break as a set back to attaining the next step in their career, whereas someone with a correlative mental model, is more likely to view it as an opportunity to explore other things.

A person can realign their mental model in response to new experiences to adapt to their new context. For example, someone with a largely correlative mental model joins a corporation and decides to ‘play the game’ of climbing the corporate ladder during their employment, reverting back to a correlative mental model when that employment ends (Figure 3). The mental gymnastics required to accommodate these shifts can be disorientating—after all it forces a reevaluation their core identity in plain view of their professional community.

FIGURE 3. Adapting mental models to the context

The evolution of a traditional, directional career path

A traditional, directional career path still has relatively clear stages of evolution spanning pre- to post-career (Figure 4). All stages may be experienced once in a lifetime, or include cycles where stages are repeated, for example where a person pivots their career. 

FIGURE 4. The evolution of a directional career path

We will start to unpack the correlative career path in section II.

‘Retirement’

Mental models for ‘retirement’ are often shaped by witnessing our parents' late career experience, as they transition away from their primary vocation or career into something else. It is a term loaded with assumptions, rarely questioned by someone in their early- to mid-career when its relevance seems decades away (there are notable exceptions to this, such as within the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) community).

Since assumptions of ‘retirement’ vary considerably, here is the definition I’ve found meaningful for my hybrid career path: “to do what you want, when you want, with whom you want”. This definition can encompass things that most people consider to be ‘work’ or not.

II. The experiences that shape a career

Thinking about clear career stages (Figure 4) is useful for a linear-ish, directional career path, but what about people whose correlative mental model of a career is altogether different? 

Over the course of a lifetime a person has a constant stream of experiences which they associate with impacting their career.

Our main interest is in experiences that are:

• subjectively associated with their career, however loose this association may seem to others,
• have been ascribed meaning by themselves or others that they interact with,
• are recalled or recollected at some point.

As a reminder, a person’s propensity and tolerance for new experiences broadens and narrows over time.

One useful way to categorise experiences that affect a career is as moments, events and phases.

Moments

A moment is a seemingly trivial experience that affects a career, even if its relevance and meaning is not apparent at the time. Often opportunistic, they require little or no effort.

A few of these moments are later defined as ‘meaningful’, as in, the passage of time reveals them to have a higher significance—sometimes attributed to luck or fate—and the lessons learned from the experience are adopted into the core identity.

For example: a chance encounter that leads to a friendship and years later to co-found a company together; a critical comment from a community member that drives a desire “to prove the critics wrong”; or reading an article that leads to starting a hobby, the skills from which sway a hiring decision. 

Events

An event is to intentionally engage in something that will impact one’s career, and usually includes anticipation, prioritisation over other experiences, a calculation of effort-reward, and a preferred outcome. It typically requires a personal investment of time, effort, finances, social capital, and emotions (Vroom, 1964; Porter & Lawler, 2011). 

For example: attending further education, applying for a job interview; attending a  conference; passing an exam, starting a family, or an overseas holiday that provides the time to reflect on work/life balance.

Phases

A phase describes the longer forces that shape career decisions and personal life. Some phases are easy to recognise whilst they occur, whilst others are only recognised and articulated years later.

For example: motivation shifts that tend to occur over different life stages, an interest area that years later develops into a full-time occupation, a career spent in a single industry that is now declining, or living in another country for three years.

The interrelation of experiences

The interrelationship between each experience may be obvious, for example in Figure 5:

• Moment. After months of ‘holding it together’ Anna starts crying in a business meeting, a release from the pent up stressors she has been feeling the last few months from an unstable home and work life (A1).
  
• Event. She quits her job, resolves to focus on self-care, and find more suitable work (A2).
• Phase. Years later, upon reflection Anna describes this period of her life as a ‘mid-life crisis’ (A3).

FIGURE 5. How moments, events and phases interrelate

Alternatively, the relevance of prior experiences may only reveal itself with the passage of time (Figure 5, A4), for example:

• Moment. Anna has a chance encounter in the bakery queue,
• Event. Much later that chance encounter leads to her landing a new job,
• Phase. The new job seems to herald the start of a new phase of her life (A5), although it is too early to tell what that might be.

 

Achieving a preferred outcome

What should we pay attention to, to increase the likelihood of an experience leading to a preferred outcome?

For example: when should we intentionally engage in an experience versus just let things ‘play out’; the probability of a preferred outcome versus suboptimal outcomes; or the later framing of an experience as luck, fate, or something else. More examples are shown in Figure 6.

FIGURE 6. What we might pay attention to in an experience

Negative experiences may lead to preferred outcomes. For example, an experience that is deemed ‘too risky’, has an overly steep learning curve, or one that was simply not enjoyable, can lead to adopting life principles that affect future decision making. Similarly, seemingly positive experiences may result in preferred short term outcomes, but when the long term opportunities from the outcomes are squandered, this leads to a (negative) sense of inadequacy.

Motivational intent

How might we explain the motivations that drive engagement with particular experience and it’s preferred outcome? 

At a high level, motivations are the intrinsic and extrinsic forces that arouse enthusiasm and drive commitment to a course of action (a need), that the person then seeks to resolve. The outcome of that action can be positive (a need is resolved), or negative (a need goes unresolved).

There are many (sometimes conflicting) theories of motivation which are summarised as:

• Biological, e.g. Evolutionary Theory (Buss, 1960), such as securing resources and protecting family,
• Behavioural, e.g. operant conditioning (Skinner, 1938), rewards and punishments, or incentive driven, such as to achieve status,
• Cognitive, e.g. Self Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000),  Goal Setting Theory (Locke et al., 2002),
• Humanistic approaches, e.g. self actualisation from Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (Maslow, 1970),
• Psychodynamic, rooted in Freudian theory of unconscious drivers and conflicts (Freud, 1900),
• Sociocultural, e.g. Sociocultural Theory (Vygotsky, 1978).

Studio D is often hired to understand motivational intent, to untangle what people do from why they do it, a nuanced topic, worthy of its own essay. For now, let’s recognise that a person’s motivations can change e.g. across different life stages, or by reprioritisation in a given context, and can be guided or manipulated e.g. by their employer, a dating app, shopping site, or social media.

Building a personal inventory of experiences

We each have a unique inventory of lived experiences to which we’ve attached meanings and made associations. 

In order to understand the impact of these experiences on a career path, I’ve generalised those of our Reflecting Forward fellows (and some my own), below. In future instalments of this essay we can categorise these experiences in a framework, but for now lets recognise that they can nudge or push us to:

• Adjust to the organisational culture, language, ways of interacting, learn how decisions are made, to better affect others,
• Assess our current situation against  loose ideas of ‘career progress’ or clearly set goals,
• Commit, to recognise that at certain times effective career choices probably require focus and intentionality, whereas at other times a better long-term outcome can be achieved by ‘going with the flow’,
• Evolve, decide what attributes of ‘the self’ to retain, and which to change or adapt to better function in new situations,
• Horizon set, the realisation that new things are possible, or conversely, prior possibilities are very unlikely or impossible,
• Pivot, from a role, company, or industry,
• Pause, to take a step back from a career, with a view to picking it back up at a later date e.g. full time parent, paternity leave, supporting a significant other, caregiver, a sabbatical, re-skilling, or gracefully taking a break to do ‘nothing’,
• Reprioritise, based on a new situation,
• Realign, to values and purpose (which may have evolved), 
• Rebalance, to find an optimal balance between career and personal life, e.g. time with family, health and wellbeing, hobbies, clearer boundaries, etc,
• Recover, to set time aside to focus on health and wellbeing e.g. from  burn-out, a health scare, or set harder boundaries between work and personal life,
• Reflect on past and current career motivations and how these might evolve in the future. Understand the connection between where you are now and the choices you made to arrive there e.g. serendipity, investments in personal or professional development, or changes in personal circumstances,
• Reject, e.g. as a result of disillusionment with an organisational purpose and culture, broken promises, unrealised potential,
• Reinvent, stepping into a new community, location, and investing in a new identity,
• Retrench, refocus, take on less responsibility, with a likely emphasis on stability,
• Support, e.g. to coach or mentor, support others on their personal and professional journey,
• Survive, to recognise that one’s current work situation is at risk and extraordinary steps may need to be taken to get through this e.g. to shelve goals, compromise values, forgo status, or prioritise the career of another family member in the service of stability, healthcare coverage (in the US), or to reduce debts.

Summary and what’s next

The purpose of introducing career path mental models is to recognise that in order to understand what we might become we first have to understand how a person frames their career, how they arrived at this point, and the experiences that that shape their understanding. 

In Part IV we’ll start to visualise the building blocks of this evolution, before finally integrating these into a single framework.

 

References

• Arthur, M. B., Khapova, S. N, & Wilderom, C. P. M. (2005). Career success in a boundaryless career world. Journal of Organisational Behavior, 26, 177-202.
• Buss, David M. (2019) Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind. 6th ed. New York: Routledge,.
• Freud, Sigmund (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated 3rd Edition. George Allen & Unwin Ltd.
• Hall, Douglas T. (2001). Careers In and Out of Organizations. SAGE Publications Inc.
• Locke, Edwin A. (1968). Toward a Theory of Task Motivation and Incentives. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 3, no. 2: 157–89. 
• Maslow, Abraham H. (1999) Toward a Psychology of Being. 3rd ed. New York: Wiley.
• Porter, Lyman W., and Edward E. Lawler III, (1968). Managerial Attitudes and Performance. Irwin Dorsey Series in Behavioral Science.
• Ryan, Richard M., and Edward L. Deci (2000). Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being. American Psychologist 55, no. 1 : 68–78.
• Skinner, B.F. (1938) The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,.
• Vroom, Victor H. (1964). Work and Motivation. New York: Wiley. 
• Vygotsky, Lev S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Edited by Michael Cole et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  

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Photos: Beijing, San Francisco, Lagos, and Yading in Sichuan.