Meaningful work: what it is and how can we help our clients to identify it?

Meaningful work is something which has been written about a fair amount in the literature but it's always been a bit piecemeal. It's a topic of interest to organisational and business psychologists, positive psychologists and of course career development theorists, but these academic arenas haven't really paid much attention to each other, resulting in an evidence base which is patchy and confusing.
This paper "Purpose and meaning in career development applications" starts to plug the gap, providing a good summary of the relevant literature and giving some examples of practical exercises that career practitioners can use with their clients.
The authors identify six different areas that are deemed worthy of our consideration: strengths, positive emotions and flow, gratitude, work hope, job crafting and calling.
Overall the evidence between career well-being and life well-being is strong and the research indicates that people, these days, are looking for work which matters in a deeper and more existential way, developing their potential and making a contribution to the common good.
But what do we know about what factors lead to a more meaningful career, and how can we as practitioners help our clients to achieve this?

1. Strengths.
According to strengths theory our strengths carry intrinsic meaning, so simply using our strengths brings meaning to our lives. Evidence shows that using our strengths on a daily basis increases the levels of meaning in our lives and using them at work increases meaning at work and job satisfaction. Two classifications of strengths are recommended for our work with clients: the Values in Action strengths finder and Clifton's Strengths finder. These can be great tools to help your clients identify their strengths and this can lead to valuable discussions.

2. Positive emotions and flow
When people feel better at work they are more fulfilled and they work more effectively. Positive emotions have been shown to link with creative problem solving, helping behaviours and job satisfaction. We can help our clients to experience more positive emotions at work by getting them to think of ways in which they can seek out or create situations which are likely to make them feel good. One way to do this is to try and get them to think about the situations in which they experience 'flow'.
Flow is that feeling you get when you are so absorbed in a task that you're not aware of time passing and don't notice anything going on around you. It can enhance mood, boost self-esteem and give you a sense of purpose. Flow tends to happen when people are engaged with something they are good at but find hard. If we can get clients to identify times when they experience flow at work, we could then work with them to think about how they could get themselves in to those situations more frequently.

3. Gratitude
Being thankful and giving thanks for what you've got has been linked to greater well-being. It has been shown to stir up positive emotions, allows us to focus on our blessings, and creates an expectation and a confidence that good things will come to us. There is a little bit of evidence too that these positive outcomes apply to work-related gratitude. The authors therefore suggest that we should encourage our clients to count their work blessings and maybe even engage in thanking some of their colleagues for what they have brought to their working lives.

4. Work hope
Hope in an academic context means something much more specific than its definition in everyday conversation. In psychological terms it has three elements: a goal, a pathway to a goal and agency. So it's knowing where you want to get to, knowing how to get there, and believing that you can do it. Having hope is linked to increased self-esteem, making self-directed career decisions and is so closely associated with having meaningful work that some academics claim that it is in fact a core element of meaningful work, rather than a separate construct. Working with clients on identifying goals and breaking these down in to numerous sub-goals has been shown to help foster hope.

5. Job crafting
This is one which has been around for a while in career development theories but is new to positive psychology. It makes explicit the idea that we have some control over our jobs and can shape them to better meet our needs. Workers can engage in task, relational and cognitive crafting. This process results in individuals changing their daily work to involve more tasks which better suit them, spending time with people they work well with, and thinking about their work more positively. It has been shown to link with performance, satisfaction and commitment, so everyone is a winner!

6. Calling
Again, not a new one for many career practitioners. As sense of calling is when someone feels destined to fulfil a particular role which fits with their broader life purpose and has a connection with something pro-social. Links have been found in the research between having a calling and life wellbeing, job satisfaction and meaning at work. Conversations with clients which encourage them to think about the three key elements (what they were born to do, what do think matters in life, and what could they contribute to the greater good) can spark off ideas in clients who may not have identified their calling.

Dik, B.J., Duffy, R.D., Allan, B.A., O’Donnell, M.B., Shim, Y. and Steger, M.F. (2015) Purpose and meaning in career development applications The Counseling Psychologists, 43(4) 558 – 585

Psychology-of-working perspective: A theory for the less privileged

A challenge that is often levelled at career decision making theories is that the whole notion of making a choice about what path to follow is a fanciful luxury for huge swathes of the population.


I love a career theory, but I never have a great answer for this - I try argue that most people have at least some kind of choice at some level, and also that even if choices are limited for many, we still need career decision making theories to help support the choices of others. But to be honest, It's a weak argument.

But here is a nice theory which specifically addresses the issue: the psychology-of-working perspective (Blustein, 2006). It's ten years old, but I've only recently come across it, and I think it's got something to offer.

The psychology-of-working perspective (Blustein, 2006) was developed to sit alongside traditional career decision making theories, and is aimed at helping us to understand the experiences of those for whom work is a basic form of survival rather than an expression of self-actualisation.


The authors of this theory highlight some particular groups of individuals who are likely to have limited choice over their career trajectories. These include those on welfare who are required to take any job which comes their way, those with learning disabilities, those who lack the economic or social resources to get the training they need to get the jobs they desire and those who are discriminated against on the grounds of gender, race, ethnicity or social class. They argue (rightly so) that people in these groups are less likely to have a wide range of options open to them, so the more mainstream career theories which encourage individuals to design their own lives, actualise their self-concepts or live out their values in their work, simply don't apply.

So this theory tries to be a bit broader and works at different levels. According to the psychology-of-working perspective, work fulfils three functions: survival and power; relatedness; and self-determination.

At the bottom of the pyramid, work provides us with a means to survive, and some source of power over our own lives, though access to material resources (ie money) and social resources (ie status). The second facet is relatedness - work allows us to develop meaningful relationships. Good relationships with colleagues have been shown to increase job satisfaction and improve well-being in all areas of our lives. The third element is the notion of self-determination (Ryan and Deci, 2000) which says that intrinsic motivation is always going to lead to more fulfilling work than extrinsic: if you can find a job your enjoy for its own sake, you're going to be happier than if you are just working to earn money to pay the bills. Blustein acknowledges that many of us are in jobs which aren't necessarily all that intrinsically interesting, but suggests that one thing that career practitioners could usefully do, is to work with clients to see if they can identify ways to make their jobs more fulfilling.



The theory suggests, much like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that you need to have the lower needs met before you can start to think about the higher level needs: you're not going to start thinking about whether or not you have lovely colleagues until you are sure you're earning enough money to survive. In this way, the approach provides a single framework which explains the motivation of those who have limited work choices as well as those who have control over their career paths.


Alongside this explanatory framework, Blustein gives four recommendations for practice, suggesting that career practitioners should:


1) Foster empowerment
2) Foster critical consciousness
3) Promote skill building
4) Provide support for work volition


The first three aren't particularly innovative - career practitioners are well versed in encouraging clients to take ownership of their own career paths, ensuring their decisions are grounded in reality and ensuring that they are aware of their strengths and how they can build on them. The fourth though, this idea of supporting 'work volition' feels a bit different. The focus here is on getting clients to address the barriers which might be keeping them stuck at the 'survival and power' level, and maybe seeing if they could overcome, or even reframe the barriers.


I quite like this theory. It's perhaps not rocket science, but it does make sense to me, and I think that a theory which actually reflects the real lives of our clients is useful.





Why aren't there more learning theories in careers?

I've probably talked about this before, (probably on more than one occasion) but I'm thinking again about the role that learning theories should play in career education, and wondering if that's a bit different from the one they actually play.

I trained as a careers adviser nearly 20 years ago, and these days I'm not really sure what kinds of learning theories get covered in other career practitioner courses. But as someone relatively new to teaching, I have spent quite a lot of time finding out about how people learn, and it's been a revelation to me. My knowledge is a bit home-made, and I'm sure it's not comprehensive, but I can see that even what I know would be really useful for any career practitioner who works with groups of clients.

So, here are my top three favourite learning theories (and a bit of empirical evidence) and what I do differently now that I know about them.

1. The pyramid of learning:

 

The detail of the study which led to this has been a bit discredited, but the underpinning concepts seem to stand up to scrutiny. The basic premise is that you are likely to remember very little of what you hear in a lecture, a bit more of what you talk about and almost everything that you have had to actually teach.

Students I find can be a bit resistant to this, but when I am trying to get people to get their heads round something really complex, I ask them to prepare a short chunk of a lesson and teach each other. It's complicated logistically, but works really well.

2. Andragogy
This is a fairly old one (Knowles 1958) which is supposed to show how adults learn in a different way from children. I remain unconvinced about the difference between the two groups of learners, but I like what the theory suggests. Knowles suggests that the key to good learning is to link the topic being studied to the participants' lives. First of all the approach holds that to motivate students to learn, they have to understand why they are learning this and what it's going to do for them. Then it's important that the students make links between the new information they are learning and what they already know. Finally a teacher should spend time at the end making sure the students are really, explicitly clear about how exactly they can incorporate their new learning into their practice.

This isn't rocket science, is it, but for me having this explicitly in my mind when I plan sessions is useful.

3. The link between thought and language.
This is probably my very favourite. It comes from Vygotsky, who seems to have come up with a wide arrange of innovative theories. Vygotsky suggests that thought and language are really closely bound up together. He says that thoughts aren't created as fully formed, properly worked though concepts. They start as fuzzy notions, and it is only when they are put into words that the thoughts become concrete. This suggests that in a learning context, each participant needs to be given the opportunity to put their own ideas into words in order to make their ideas more tangible. The words could be written or spoken, and done in pairs, groups or class discussion.

4. Learning styles
This isn't a favourite theory, but it's a favourite bit of empirical evidence. Learning styles have really cornered the market when it comes to learning theories and there are at least 71 different learning style frameworks (Honey and Mumford are the most well known). They are intuitively appealing, and it's always nice to be able to identify what kind of learner you are. But the evidence supporting their value as a way to enhance learning is really weak. It seems to be fairly well documented that people do indeed have preferences - there are definitely people who like looking at pictures more than words, or who prefer thinking about abstract concepts over the application of ideas. But the evidence is pretty consistent that this has very little (or no) impact on how well people actually learn. Visual learners don't absorb more information when it's presented in picture form than in words, and reflectors don't excel when given more space to reflect.

There are a few more. I also like Active Learning (I did a blog post on that last year, I think) and I'm really keen on student-centred learning. And there are probably dozens (maybe hundreds) of other theories out there.

I think my teaching is genuinely better since I've started to understand some of these, and I wonder if careers education broadly might benefit from a stronger underpinning of learning theories?

 

Career Sagacity

I've been involved with quite a few discussions recently about our profession and what makes it unique. We do seem to struggle to define or articulate what exactly distinguishes us from other helping professions. Colleagues have variously suggested that it's knowledge about the world of work, self-reflective practice, or an impartial, client-centred philosophy, but I struggle with all of these. The first one (knowledge of the world of work) because I really don't want the heart of my professionalism to reside in something which I could never properly keep on top of and which Google does so much better than me, and the second two (reflective practice and an impartial client-centred philosophy) because they don't mark us out as any different from counsellors, therapists or social workers.

But I was reading something about the notion of wisdom, and it really struck a chord. I think this is the closest thing I've come to which reflects what I'm aiming for in my professional practice. This stuff isn't new, but I'm not sure I've seen it applied to our role before.

Berlin's wisdom paradigm (Baltes and Freund, 2003) sets out five criteria which make up wisdom. I describe them below as they might apply to career practice:

1.  Rich factual knowledge. As career practitioners we should have a superior knowledge base about the world of work. I'm not at all suggesting this needs to be perfect, but I think it's genuinely helpful for us to have a good overview, and some professional knowledge which is hard for our clients to access.

2. Rich knowledge of how to deal with these pragmatics. So this is where career theories come in. We should know how people make career decisions, how people make good career decisions, where people get stuck, and how clients can change their responses or behaviour to make getting jobs more likely. Here too sits our practice - this section encompasses information about how to work with clients to support them to make the most fulfilling choices and achieve their goals.

3. Knowledge about the themes and contexts of life. This puts careers within a system, and ensures that practitioners understand the different drivers and different factors which are woven into each career decision.

4. Recognition and tolerance of differences in beliefs. Here's where the self-reflective, client-centred and non-judgemental philosophy fits in.

5. Recognition and tolerance of uncertainly and ambiguity. This feels like an  excellent approach to dealing both with people and the world of work. It ensures that we focus on equipping our clients with the resources they need to negotiate their changing lives and the changing work place, and that we too can cope with the shifting landscapes that we face. It touches on career resilience and adaptability,

Key to this framework is the idea that wisdom doesn't depend on superior cognitive or technical knowledge: we are not competing with Google to know everything there is to know about careers in the 21st century, but it's a combination of knowledge and an understanding of how that knowledge is applied. It's not quite as client-centred as the coaching approach that I normally advocate, but I think it's interesting.

I've thought about this framework in terms of my own practice - my aspirations to be a Career Sage, but an alternative framing could allow us to see this as a taxonomy of the elements we are trying to engender in our clients. Perhaps it's more appropriate to work towards our clients becoming Career Sages.

Either way, I thought this was rather interesting and good food for thought.

Baltes, P.B. (1987) Theoretical propositions o fife-span developmental psychology: on the dynamics between growth and decline. Developmental Psychology 23 611 - 626

Balters, P.B., Staudinger, U.M, Maercker, A. and Smith J. (1985) People nominated as wise: a comparative study of wisdom-related knowledge, Psychology and Aging 10, 155- 166

Levels of interventiveness

Just following on from my theme of non-directivity, I found this transcript of a presentation given by Margaret Warner, which I thought proposed a really interesting framework which might help us reflect on our own practice - both where it is and where we would like it to be.

 

Warner suggests that under the umbrella of client-centred practices, there are 5 levels of 'interventiveness' by which she means the degree to which the practitioner brings frameworks and ideas beyond the client's field of reference to the interventions.

 

Level 1 is really hypothetical. At Level 1, the practitioner brings nothing of themselves to the intervention and the dialogue and relationship exist entirely within the client's frame of reference. This is thought to be unrealistic (even if it were desirable, which is a moot point) as however skilful the practitioner, the client and practitioner are two different people and cannot inhabit the same psychological space.

 

At Level 2, the practitioner uses their own experiences and their frames of reference to help them to understand the client more fully. They are not trying in anyway to change the psychology of the client, just to understand it and walk in their client's shoes for a bit. The practitioner will try to communicate their understanding to the client, and if this works, the client will feel understood in that moment. The practitioner is aspiring to high levels of personal contact and low levels of control. Interventions at this level really are at the heart of Rogers's client centred approach.

 

At Level 3, the practitioner brings their own ideas, frames of reference and interpretations into the dialogue in order to allow the client to decide whether they are useful or relevant or not. The client is still responsible for the overall direction and content of the relationship and conversation. The relationship is very much one of equals.

 

At Level 4, the practitioner brings material to the dialogue from their frames of reference as an expert. This is a diagnostic model, where the practitioner finds out about the problem and makes a decision as to what kind of intervention is needed. The practitioner introduces these interventions to the client but from a position as the expert the assumption from both client and practitioner is that these should be implemented.

 

At Level 5, the practitioner introduces interventions without telling the client what they are doing or why. This contains the authoritative qualities of a Level 4 intervention but adds the idea that the client is unaware of what is being done to them.

 

Warner warns of the dangers of trying to incorporate interventions at different levels within the same therapeutic process, as the nature of the work alliance will be quite different at one level from another.

 

Levels 1 - 3 aim to foster a safe space in which the client can make their own decisions and where key issues can come to the fore. Levels 4 and 5 assume a considerable resistance in the client.

 

As I read these descriptions, I wonder if I'm a bit torn. If I think about what is going to be best for the client, I think I come down firmly in favour of Level 3.  I am thoroughly sold on the self-actualizing tendency and the idea that the client is in the best place to make their own decisions. But I wonder if I am a little bit seduced by the notion of the expert in Level 4. I quite like the idea of being able to solve my clients' problems and I also wonder if clients themselves often see a value (or a security) in Level 4 interventions which might be harder to spot in Level 3.

 

I think this feeds into discussions about our own expertise. What is it that we can offer clients that no other practitioners can? I always come back to the idea that we are experts in the process of career and interventions - we know how people make career decisions and how to help them to make better career decisions. But where does that fit best? I think it is level 3. I think at level 3, practitioners can bring their own expertise, but they acknowledge that the client is the expert judge of whether these ideas are helpful. At level 4, our expertise is more obvious, but less helpful. But I think we as a profession need to be confident in order to position ourselves at Level 3.

 

 

http://www.adpca.org/system/files/documents/journal/PCJ%20V7%20N1%207.pdf

“La Psychotherapie Centree sur la Personne: Une nation, plusiers clans. Mouvence Rogerienne—Nouvelle serie #9—Paris, Novembre 2004. (Translation by Cecile Rousseau of ”Person-Centered Therapy: One Nation Many Tribes.”)

Non-directivity in career coaching

At the heart of much of our career professionalism is the notion that we are non-directive practitioners. This is widely accepted and its importance is felt keenly. I wonder, though, if it has become one of those concepts which is so much part of our fabric that we don't really think about how it works and whether it's actually a good thing. I thought it might be useful if I just reminded myself what it is and spent a moment checking that I still believed in it.

At the heart of the non-directivity principle is the notion of self-actualization, the belief that we are all intrinsically motivated to change, to grow and develop. This is a biological tendency, not a moral imperative - it's part of the human condition and is simply what it means to be human. The role of the practitioner is to help clients work out what might be preventing this growth and help them identify what to do about it. The client is in charge of identifying what the problem is and working out what the solution is. This approach to practice is not just a moral position, it's a belief about how it is. Advice and suggestion from outside simply won't work and risk getting in the way of the all-important therapeutic alliance.

So that's the theory, as set out by Rogers (1957).

Rogers himself was concerned that the notion of non-directivity was being misunderstood. He originally used it as synonymous with 'client-centred' but and dropped it from his lexicon fairly early on in his writing. Some of his concern seemed to be that non-directivity was thought to be an element of client centred practice. In fact it's more fundamental than that: the central axiom of client centred practice determines that practice should be non-directive. A client centred approach does not include non-directivity - non-directivity is entirely bound up with the theory. The motivational force for change resides within the individual and a facilitative attitude in the therapist leads to the relationship which gives the client the resources to unleash this force. Non-directivity is a natural and inevitable consequence of a belief in the actualizing tendency.

The non-directive principle is sometime criticised for being impossible to achieve. However hard we try to be entirely unbiased, our own opinions will inevitably surface in our responses to our clients' stories. But actually, the hard-line version of non-directive counselling, as described by Rogers, doesn't require a consistent and perfect lack of bias. Rather, it advocates an adherence to the philosophy of non-directivity - a commitment to and a belief in the self-authority and self-determination of the client. Rogers states that 'reasonable consistency' in non-directive practice is enough to facilitate growth and that a 'facilitative attitude' is the thing to strive for.

So that's how it is described in its original form. How should that be applied to careers work?

I think that career practice in general sticks to the principle that we shouldn't tell our clients what to do. Most of us, most of the time would baulk at the idea that after an hour with a client, we might be in a position to tell them what career path to follow - and I think we would be against this both morally (it's not our place to do this) and practically (we simply couldn't do it). This, I think, is the role that non-directivity holds in our practice. A more hard-line version of non-directivity though would lead to career practitioners giving no advice and giving no suggestions. At all. It would preclude us from telling clients what steps to take, where to look for job vacancies and what A levels you need to take to get into medical school. It would even mean that we shouldn't suggest that a client chooses a goal for the conversation or identifies any action points to implement afterwards.

This I think feels more extreme than we see in most career practice, and I'm not at all sure that we would be doing our clients any favours if we help back from expressing ourselves altogether.

For me, one useful idea has emerged from Grant (1989) who talks about the difference between principled non-directivity and instrumental non-directivity.  His idea of instrumental non-directivity seems to suggest that a practitioner (he was writing from the perspective of a therapist, but the same could apply to any therapeutic intervention) should be non-directive until the point at which an intervention of some sort would be useful to the client. It's about a philosophy of non-directivity but within the context of a process.

For me, this works. I almost always use a model (usually the GROW model) as a structure for my career conversations. I find that this framework, with its goals at the beginning, and action points at the end allows me and my client to make good use of our time together and achieve more than with a less structured dialogue. But within this framework, about which I am directive, I try to stick to non-directive content. I direct the process, my client directs the content.

Another interesting idea has come from Kahn (1990) who suggests that the idea of therapist fallibility is a more useful notion than non-directivity. He describes an approach which he calls directive responsivity, where the therapist does make suggestions of interventions, but where both the therapist and the client acknowledge that the therapist might be wrong. Advice giving and suggestions can then be a manifestation of the therapist's empathetic understanding and congruence, and show authenticity.

I think for me the important thing is to keep the best interests of the client at the heart of every decision I make within my intervention. I truly buy in to the notion of the self-actualising tendency, I genuinely believe that the best decisions will come from my client and their motivation will come from their belief that this is the right decision. But where my client is definitely the expert on themselves, I am the expert on the process. I bring some knowledge and experience and understanding of career theories and psychological theories which means that sometimes I have a different perspective to share.

So I think I can be comfortable with the notion of instrumental non-directivity, and directive responsivity, where my client is in charge of the content but I may be directive about the process.

 

Grant, B. (May, 1989). Principled and instrumental nondirectiveness in person-centered and client-centered therapy. Paper presented at the Third Annual Meeting of the Association for the Development of the Person-Centered Approach in Atlanta, May, 1989

 

Kahn, E. (1999). A critique of non-directivity in the person-centered approach. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 39(4), 94-110

http://www.ibrarian.net/navon/paper/A_Critique_of_Nondirectivity_in_the_Person_Center.pdf?paperid=6672382

Labour Market Information in Career Conversations: What should practitioners know and how can academic research help

I'm not a big fan of using labour market information in career practice. I know I'm out of synch with the prevailing view in the profession, but I have concerns about information giving being at the heart of our professional role.

But I spent yesterday with my career coaching students, and we had some great discussions about the role of information about the world of work in career conversations. Particularly interesting to me were our discussions about what kind of information practitioners should know. There is always going to be far too much information about the labour market for us to absorb, so how do we decide what is going to be most useful?

We talked first about having a broad overview. Whilst it might be impossible to know what kinds of selection tests are used in all kinds of employers, it could be useful to have a good sense of the range of tests which are generally used. We may not have a clear sense of exactly what standards of professional dress are expected in a particular organisation, but it might be realistic to know the smartest and most casual boundaries within a particular industry as a whole. So, an overview is good, and in terms of the detail, it's about knowing where to look - what are the best resources that you can direct clients to, which they can use to get the information for themselves.

The second area we discussed was that it might be really useful for us to have information which is difficult for clients to find themselves. Whilst the ONS website might furnish us with some great statistics, it's also an easy place for our clients to look. So, what might be more useful for us is to focus on the kind of information which is difficult to find. One example of the difference between easy to find and hard to find information is knowledge about what employers say and what they do. The literature is clear that when it comes to recruitment, what employers actually do is different from what they say they do. Employers are often quite explicit about the criteria against which they measure candidates, but there is oodles of evidence that despite the rhetoric, white candidates with middle class accents, well groomed hair and no disability are more likely to get jobs regardless of their teamwork, communication and leadership skills. Having this kind of information, I think, is adding something to our clients' job hunting toolkits which they would find difficult to access themselves, and which might genuinely make a difference.

For me, this is another argument for the role of empirical research in career work. Employers and employees are often happy to share lots of useful information about their roles, organisations and industries. This is useful, perhaps essential information for a good career decision and a successful job search. But if we can get it by looking on websites and finding people to talk to then so can our clients. Academic research is harder to get hold of and harder to make sense of. As career practitioners, we are often educated to post-graduate level, and we learn how to find and interpret this information. And it is these academic studies which are going to be able to uncover the information that even the employers don't know that they know.

At this stage I begin to get quite enthused about occupational information. This feels like an approach to LMI which doesn't aim to turn our role into information-givers, but instead gives us a challenging and skillful role to play, which can take our clients beyond where they can get to on their own.