Theories Series: Planned Happenstance

Planned Happenstance (Mitchell et al. 1999)

Introduction

This is one of the most popular and well-used career theories. It is a descriptive theory, meaning that it does just literally describe how people’s careers actually unfold. This differs from many of the theories we cover in this book which are prescriptive theories – those that give advice on what you should be doing – prescribing how you can do it better. Of course, as career practitioners, we want to help our clients do things better – that is the whole point. But the advice we give needs to be relatable – it needs to build on their natural or instinctive approaches rather than try to replace them altogether. And that’s where the magic of Planned Happenstance lies.

The starting point of Planned Happenstance is the understanding that most people’s career paths are a bit haphazard. Traditional advice advocates specific career goals and five year plans, but in reality, very few of us are that clear sighted, and, even those who have identified career goals often find themselves facing unexpected decisions as life doesn’t always go to plan.

The theory of Planned Happenstance acknowledges the messiness of our lives and our careers and the huge impact and potential that can come from chance opportunities. But it also buys into the idea that you can make your own luck – you can make choices about what you look for, what you see and how you respond to what comes your way.

The key message of the theory is that we should make sure that we look out for chance opportunities, identify them and then capitalize on them. This mindset will then allow us to make the most of whatever life throws at us. It can also make us more resilient. It shows that goals will always change, so if you don’t end up exactly where you planned to be, it isn’t necessarily a problem, embracing the principle that when one door closes another one opens.

The authors of this approach have identified five key principles that we need to adopt to embrace a planned happenstance approach to career development.

 

Five Planned Happenstance Principles

Be curious. The more you open your mind the more chances will come your way. Be interested to find out about different careers, different approaches, different ideas and this might lead to more ideas and opportunities.

Be flexible. Goals and plans can be useful – we know that they make us more motivated and resilient, but if we stick to them too rigidly, they can start to limit us. It’s great to have some ideas of goals, and some plans to get there, but it’s important to recognize that there is no single perfect job, and not just one way to get to it. If opportunities come your way, you need to be able to change your mindset and take advantage of them, even if it takes you away from your set course.

Take risks. Things won’t always work out, but that’s fine. Maybe it won’t work out, but maybe it will, and if you don’t try, you will never know.

Be positive. Every opportunity will teach you something. Even the worst job, the most humiliating job interview, the most excruciating networking opportunity can push us forward, allowing us to understand a bit more about ourselves and the world.

Don’t give up. Things don’t usually come easily. Most of us have to work and try and fail and then work and try again. To reap the rewards you want, you need to stick with it and keep going, but if you focus solely on the goal at the end, you may miss out on some interesting and enjoyable life experiences that you encounter on the journey.

 

Using Planned Happenstance in Practice

 

1)    To reassure clients. This can be a good theory to share explicitly with clients whose careers have not gone quite to plan. Knowing that they own experience is reflected in an actual theory can help to normalise and validate the choices they have made. Sharing the theory can get clients to see that a seemingly haphazard or incoherent career path is very natural, and does not indicate that anything has gone wrong or that they have failed in any way.

2)    To help clients to be more flexible The theory can also be useful to share with clients who seem quite rigid in their approach to career planning. Clients who seem either unhelpfully fixed on a particular goal, or anxious about trying to find the ‘right’ career path can learn that some flexibility is helpful and that spontaneity has an important part to play in any good career path.

3)    To increase our empathy as practitioners The theory is a helpful reminder for practitioners that being undecided is not necessarily a problem and that as long as people are open to ideas and making an effort to seek out opportunities, the goals are likely to come.

4)    To structure career education. The five principles needed to spot, identify and capitalise on chance opportunities can be used to help structure career education. You could take the principles in turn and identify some activities aimed at boosting your clients’ awareness of the value of each. Here are some examples:

i)               To pique curiosity, you could find some interesting stories of alumni from their school or course who have gone on to interesting or unexpected positions.

ii)              To encourage flexibility, you could ask your clients to reflect on a time in their lives when one door opened because another one closed.

iii)             To boost risk taking, you could get clients to identify a particular risk they are anxious about and push them to really examine the nature and severity of the risks. Invite them to imagine that they took the risk and then to think about their feared outcome, asking them to articulate what would be the worst that could happen. Encourage them to think about the consequences, and then to consider how they would cope if their worst fears came true. Sometimes this exercise will confirm that the risk is not worth taking. More often than not, it demonstrates that the negative consequences aren’t actually that bad.

iv)             To encourage some positivity, you could use some techniques from positive psychology that have been shown to boost our moods. One nice one is the ‘Three Good Things’ exercise, where people need to identify three good things that happened to them each day for the course of a week.

v)              Finally, to boost resilience, you could try and encourage your clients to make clear distinctions between aspects of their lives that are within their control and those which are not. You could ask your client to reflect on a recent negative experience - perhaps a job they applied for and didn’t get. Encourage them to unpick what exactly happened – what led to their rejection, and to identify the aspects that they were in control of (for example, turning up to the interview on time, doing sufficient preparation) and those they weren’t (such as who the other candidates were).

Further reading:

Mitchell, K. E., Al Levin, S., & Krumboltz, J. D. (1999). Planned happenstance: Constructing unexpected career opportunities. Journal of counseling & Development, 77(2), 115-124.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/j.1556-6676.1999.tb02431.x?casa_token=UQgxNa4ZYUIAAAAA:UWtOy2C6h-E844ZioW3TiP1pp6V0UporfZmnFdOhwHLTXxJtFUJ8aBictrx4pIapm4C38-EsFaNn1TGW

Theories Series: Career Construction Theory

 

I've been doing a lot of thinking about career theories lately, and how we can use them in our career coaching practice. This is one of the most popular theories in the US, and I think is an easy one to incorporate into practice. 

 

Introduction

Career Construction Theory is the brainchild of Mark Savickas, one of the big beasts in career academia over the last generation. Career Construction is all about agency – the idea that people believe that they themselves have some control and power over their own lives and futures. Its critics argue that he goes a bit far down this line, almost ignoring the impact of environmental factors, but we do know that a sense of agency can make a big difference to an individual’s chances of career success. Career Construction Theory holds that people construct their own careers and rather than slotting into any kind of pre-planned, pre-destined, tried and tested career path, people can and should take control and design their own careers.

Savickas aims to combine the best of three different groups of career theories, taking some ideas from matching theories, some from the developmental approaches, and some from narrative theories. Career construction suggests that people should think about what kinds of jobs they are suited to (matching), how people learn to cope with the challenges of careers and work (developmental), and why people make the choices they do – how they tell their stories (narrative). He describes Career Construction as a theory that is fit for the modern world, with all of its complexities and shape-shifting. It’s a theory that can account for the whole career lifespan, and encourages people to keep developing, reflecting, adjusting and striving throughout their whole careers, making choices that allow them to have a lifetime of meaningful career fulfilment.

 

Key Ideas in Career Construction Theory

 Life Themes

At the heart of Career Construction Theory is the idea that careers are all about what matters. What matters to you, and how your choices matter to other people. It’s about the meaning that people put on their experiences – the way they interpret what has happened to them, and the meaning that they want to find in their lives and careers. Career Construction Theory is very linked to narrative approaches to counselling – seeing a person’s career as a story – one that can be told and re-told in different ways at different times. It’s notable that Savickas very much talks about ‘life’ themes, and indeed, one of his other big ideas is called Life Design. In both of these, he is making the point that you can’t really separate career and life.

Vocational Personality

This aspect of Career Construction Theory builds on the more traditional kind of matching approaches. It focuses on what you as an individual might have to offer an employer, and how you might look for a job where those attributes are useful. Your vocational personality includes things like your career interests, strengths, needs and values. This mirrors the traditional matching approaches, such as Holland’s RIASEC model, which we covered in Chapter 8.  But Career Construction Theory conceptualises these attributes and their relationship with work slightly differently. Rather than a set of fixed characteristics that need to fit neatly with a rigid work role, Career Construction Theory sees these characteristics as far more flexible –as social constructs rather than tangible attributes; our interpretations of ourselves, or stories that we tell ourselves, rather than facts. In terms of career construction, these characteristics are a good starting point for thinking about how we want to see ourselves, who we want to become and how we can adapt both our selves and our jobs to mould to each other.

Career Adaptability

Building on that idea of being able to adapt, then Career Adaptability is the third key concept within Career Construction Theory. The assumption is that both individuals and jobs need to adapt - both to each other and to the every shifting environment, re-inventing themselves all the time to keep relevant and to face the future. I’ll go on to talk about this idea in more detail in part three of this Chapter.

 

Using Career Construction Theory in Practice

To apply Career Construction Theory in career counselling, Savickas developed the Career Style Interview. This is a series interesting questions to help your clients to tell, understand and reflect on their own stories. Savickas talks about these questions allowing people to identify their ‘life themes’ and it can definitely be valuable to think about any common threads running through your clients’ answers.

The full Career Style Interview has nine quite meaty questions. Asking all of the questions is time consuming and probably too much for the context in which most of us practice, but these are the ones that I find lead to the most insightful conversations, and asking even one or two can lead to some fruitful discussions. If you like these and want to know more, you can find the full list here: http://vocopher.com/CSI/CSI.pdf

Career Style Interview (adapted from Savickas)

1.     Who do you admire? OR Who did you admire when you were growing up?

a.     In what ways are you similar or different from them?

b.     What advice would they give you?

c.     How would your life / career be different if you were to live your life more like them?

2.     What are you favourite TV shows / podcasts / social media influencers

a.     What do you like about them?

3.     What is your all time favourite story?

a.     Who is your favourite character – why do you like them and in what ways are you similar to or different from them?

4.     What do you do with your free time?

a.     What do you get from it?

5.     What is your favourite motto or saying OR what saying would you have printed on a t-shirt?

a.     Why do you like that motto?

b.     What would be different if you lived your life more according to that saying?

 

As with so many career exercises, the value is not in the question or the answers, but in the analysis and reflection you get your client to do afterwards. Most of these questions can reveal something about what really matters to them, and what kind of life they want to lead but you do need to spend time with them getting them to unpick what they think their answers say about them. Make sure you ask your client what they feel their answers say about their values, and use them as a starting point for a conversation about their identity and what a well-lived life would look like for them.

 

 

Credibility, confidence and compassion: how career theories can boost our practice and our profession

I have spent a lot of the last few years thinking about career development theories – the ones that try to explain how and why people make their career choices, and how careers develop. I find them fascinating but they are not without their flaws: there are too many, they aren’t generally very clearly explained and it’s hard to know how to use them in practice. I have seen career theories taught very well in courses, and have seen lots of accessible, clearly written guides to the key theories. But despite this, most of the career practitioners I speak to – both those who are very experienced, and those fresh from their studies - generally say that they don’t really use these theories; they would like to, but just don’t quite know how to.

I thought I would see if I could find some positive stories – from practitioners who do use theories in their work and who find them beneficial so I interviewed 30 theoretically-minded career practitioners. Their stories bowled me over. Their knowledge of theories was brilliant, they applied the theories in their practice skilfully and expertly and they all had some great examples of using the theories in a wide range of different contexts. They were very impressive.

Why use theories?

The practitioners identified three key reasons for using theories.

1.     Theories lead to deeper understanding

Most commonly, the practitioners found that using theories helped them to understand their clients more deeply and more quickly. One of the participants gave a good example of this, explaining that when she was a client who was interested in law:

‘rather than just accepting that a client wants to be a lawyer, you think about where the idea came from (opportunity structures), whether they would fit in (trait and factor), how it suits their life roles (LifeSpan LifeSpace) how it fits with their identity (identity theory).’

The theories can have the same impact on the clients themselves and the practitioners spoke about how explaining a one idea from a theory can help the clients to see themselves more clearly.

2.     Theories lead to greater confidence

The practitioners in this study talked about theories as a way to boost their credibility and confidence. Their understanding of the theoretical basis for their work made them feel more professionally credible, and they used their knowledge of theories to explain their work to stakeholders, often saying that theories proved to others that ‘it’s not easy to become a careers adviser’.

For clients, the confidence came from the way that the theories can normalise or validate their own choices. Knowing that their experiences are the subject of a theory seemed to make clients feel less isolated and less unsure of their own decisions.

3.     Theories lead to better professional practice

The practitioners used the theories to guide their conversations perhaps to develop a ‘working hypothesis’ about what is going on with a client, which could give them ideas about what to do next: ‘what questions to ask, what direction to take the conversation and some ideas for solving the problems’. Some used theories to reflect on their practice and found that this made them more self-compassionate, making them feel better about ‘the small steps and the small progress’.

Learning about theories

The practitioners were positive about how the theories were taught on their career courses, effusive about the way their course tutors made the theories come alive for them. They had also kept up to date with new ideas and theories in the field, but found this a bit more tricky and generally would welcome more theory-related CPD. Interestingly, although they felt that their career courses taught the theories really well, they reported that there was a gap in teaching how to use the theories in their practice: they left their courses understanding the theories, but not able to integrate them into their practice.

Conclusion

Our jobs are not easy and anything that we can do to make us more efficient, more effective and more credible is always welcome. I said at the start that I am a theory fan, but the practitioners in this study took this to a whole new level. I was left quite convinced that more of a focus on career development theories could make a real difference to our practice, to our clients and to the standing of our profession. So watch this space! I am working on developing some resources - some theory cards, a collection of case studies and perhaps a some further training. And do let me know if you yourself are a theory-enthusiast – I’d love to collect some more stories.

Career decisions in the real world

Over the years scholars have produced a lot of ideas to help our clients make better career decisions. Their decision-making models are based on erudite decision analysis theory, and are highly cited and well-regarded. 

But they don't work. 

Careers advisers don't use them, and students don't like them, and so young people are often left on their own to work out the actual nuts and bolts of making a choice.

And yet they manage. Every year in the UK, around 600,000 graduates leave university and almost all of them find their way to some kind of next step. Clearly, they work out their own process, and develop their own career decision-making models. So how do they manage it? And is there anything we can learn from them?

Last summer I spoke to 40 recent graduates all from the UK, all currently working. I asked them to think back to before they had any career ideas and to talk me through how they went from 'I have no idea what I want to do' to 'I have a job'. There were some common threads running through their stories, and on the back of them I developed this model - a model of real-world career decision-making. 

The stages in this model are, to some degree, familiar. The idea of having an idea, exploring it in depth and making a choice are well-worn. But there are some key differences between the stages in this model and more traditional advice. 

1). Students pick career ideas one at a time. They don't (as traditional models advise) identify a shortlist and then explore them all to identify the best one. Instead they pick one job idea, explore that and decide whether it's a yes or a no. If it's a no, they go back and pick another. 

Career choices are incredibly complex and one thing that causes decision-making paralysis is cognitive overload - too much to think about at once. Taking one job idea at a time seems like an eminently sensible idea to keep the process manageable. 

2). Self-awareness happens in the context of a particular job idea and not in isolation: students use a job idea to help develop self-awareness, rather than using self-awareness to generate a job idea. The students did not start the process by thinking about themselves, their strengths, values and requirements. Instead they started with a job idea and then reflected on themselves in terms of that one idea. They might, for example, pick the idea of nursing, then ask themselves 'What would I like about nursing? What would I not like? What would I be good at? What would I struggle with?'. 

Again, this makes perfect sense. We all know that becoming self-aware is a lifetime endeavour, and for these young people with their limited life and work experience, answering abstract questions about their strengths and values is near impossible. Placing these same questions within a tangible context - one that they can imagine or envisage makes it far easier. 

3) Students explore occupational ideas by applying for a job. Traditional models suggest that decision makers should explore, make a choice and then apply; but these graduates often explored their job idea through applying, and then made a choice. 

This makes some sense, although has its down sides. The interview process is a great way to get to talk to people working in the field, and can really help students to imagine themselves in that position. But the danger is that students use the application process as a way to avoid having to make a choice - they leave the 'choice' in the hands of the employer, seeing a job offer as a sign that the job is right for them, or perhaps feeling that they had invested so much in the application process, that they couldn't bear all their efforts to be in vain. 

This feels like an approach that could arguably be usefully encouraged, as long as the students are supported to resist the temptation just to accept their first offer. 

4) Students' decisions are mostly made through chance and instinct. They generated ideas on the back of TV programmes, they explored in-depth by talking to people they came across, and they made choices on the basis of one inspirational conversation. But where chance didn't yield a useful outcome, they became rational planners, using pros and cons lists to make choices, and attending careers events to generate ideas. 

The decision-making literature has warmed in recent years to the idea of a 'dual-processing model' in which people combine instinct and chance with some rational planning. Using instinct and chance feels like a very sensible way for students to start the process - after all there are more that 25,000 occupations in the UK, and they need some way to narrow it down. But what was noticeable in this model was that students preferred to leave it to chance - they only resorted to rational planning and research when chance and instinct failed them. Perhaps students could benefit from being encouraged to think critically about their chance encounters and instinctive decisions to make sure they don't sleepwalk into a poor choice. 

5) Graduates are always keeping their options open. They may have made a choice, and settled on a job, but for may of them, it didn't feel like a conclusion. This was what they were going to do whilst they carried on looking. 

This feels like a very reassuring message to give students. Career anxiety is widespread in young people, and one of their main fears is that they will make the wrong choice. This study shows that there is no wrong choice. Even if they end up doing something terrible, somewhere they hate, it doesn't matter. They will learn something, earn some money and be in a position to make a better choice next time round. 

I think the model the students have come up with is probably better than the traditional decision-making models. It certainly seems easier to relate to. I can see that it could be hugely reassuring to students to understand this process - perhaps learning about it in their first years. They might find it both comforting and practically useful.

I have written this up as an academic research paper which is under-going peer review at the moment. I'll post the link to the paper once it is accepted. But in the meantime, do get in touch if you want any further details!

Developing Career Identity with young people: Marcia's Identity Status Theory

I've found a new theory! Well, it isn't new as such, just new to me. 

Marcia's Identity Status Theory is about identity development in adolescents, and  Kolbert, Hilt, Crothers and Nice have written a really useful paper which links the theory very neatly with career development and offers some suggestions for career practice - I've linked to the paper in the reference list below if you want to delve deeper. The theory draws together some of the things that I've been wrangling with lately, in particular the links between career decision making and anxiety. 

Marcia's Identity Status Theory (2002) draws on and develops the ideas of Erikson who did a lot of interesting work on identity development in the 1970s, but Marcia articulates the process of developing identity, I think, in a more usable way. Marcia's theory talks about identity confusion as an inevitable part of adolescent identity development, and acknowledges that identities aren't usually formed till someone is at least 20. This proves a clear challenge for our young people in the UK, who often have to make career choices by the time they are 17.

The theory considers two dimensions of identity development: identity commitment, which is akin to career decidedness - the degree to which someone has made a choice and feels confident that this is what they want; and exploration, which is the process of self-questioning, as an individual considers their own values, attributes and world-view, and tries out different identities before crystallising their own goals. I would also argue that this process of exploration, for career development, also needs to include exploration of the world of work - career options and the labour market too. 

These two dimensions then give us four identity status positions:

Identity Diffusion is low commitment and low exploration. Students whose identity development is in this quadrant don't know what they want to do, and can't confidently name a path they want to pursue after their current course. But although they have no real plans, they aren't doing anything to help explore options. These students are often in a state of career anxiety - knowing that they need to make a choice, but anxious about how to do it, and they often end up being avoidant - refusing to engage with any useful activities because they know that engaging with career exploration will highlight their confusion and exacerbate their emotional disequilibrium. 

Identity Foreclosure: this is a state of high commitment but low exploration. These students feel committed to one particular job or pathway, but when you ask them to explain what it is and why they are drawn to it, they can't really articulate their own position. The jobs they choose are often high status (doctor, lawyer, engineer) and the student is often highly influenced by their families, friends or school. These can be tricky students to work with because they may not realise that there is more work to be done before they are in a position to make a good choice. 

Identity Moratorium:  in this state, students are exploring but have not yet committed to one particular path. Despite its rather grim sounding name, this is really where young people should be, as it is only by passing through this state that they can reach the identity achievement they need. But we also know that the very process of exploring oneself and one's career options leads to anxiety, and anxiety can lead to avoidance - thus pushing students back into the diffusion or foreclosure states (Crocetii et al., 2016; Pisarik et al., 2017).

Identity Achievement: This is where we are hoping that students will end up: high on commitment and high on exploration, and with a clear sense of their own career identity and where they want to end up, and a plan that aligns with their own values, interests and strengths. 

There seems to be some solid empirical evidence backing up this theory, with Kroger et al (2010) offering support for this path of identity development in adolescents, and other scholars showing that a crystallised identity brings all sorts of psychological rewards including resilience, emotional stability and self-esteem, as well as life satisfaction, academic achievement and positive well-being (Karas et al., 2015; Morsunbel et al., 2014; Pop et al., 2016; Sugimura et al., 2015).

Using this in practice

This framework can be used to help you understand your students current identity state. This can help you to manage career conversations or offer exercises that are likely to be pitched correctly and are therefore more likely to be effective. For example:

Identity Diffusion: Possible selves is a great exercise to try at this stage as it allows students to work with their identities and helps them to set goals. 

Identity Foreclosure: Students in this quadrant need to be encouraged to think very critically about their choices, so asking them more about why they think their dad wants them to be an engineer, or inviting them to question what they might not like about the work of a doctor is useful.

Identity Moratorium: The kind of exploration that students are engaging with at this stage inevitably involves some degree uncertainty which often (perhaps usually) leads to some anxiety, so alongside techniques to help students analyse themselves and the options available, some focus on normalising this anxiety and offering students some techniques to help is useful.

Identity Achievement: the support you can offer here is really about the application process, identifying suitable opportunities, help with CVs, application forms and interview skills.

As well as being a framework to help you to plan your own input, I think the framework could be really useful to share explicitly with students. Sharing this explicitly might help to normalise the anxiety associated with career choices, could encourage students to watch out for avoidant behaviour and could offer a pathway out, as students see that further exploration, although it might be painful, is a way through. 

I am drawn to this model because it is holistic, embracing the idea of identity, and acknowledging, explicitly, the emotional states that are so often associated with career development and which so often stand in the way of students' progressing. 

References

Crocetti, E., Beyers, W., & Cok, F. (2016). Shedding light on the dark side of identity: Introduction the special issue. Journal of Adolescence, 47, 104-108. https://doi.10/1016/j.adolescence.2016.01.002

Erikson, E. (1968). Identity: Youth and crisis. Norton. 

Kaplan, A., & Flum, H. (2012). Identity formation in educational settings: A critical focus for education in the 21st century. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 37(3), 171-175. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2012.01.005

Kroger, J., Martinussen, M., & Marcia, J. (2010). Identity status change during adolescence and young adulthood: A meta-analysis. Journal of Adolescence, 33(5), 683–698. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2009.11.002  

Kolbert, J., Hilt, D., Crothers, L. & Nice,M.  (2021) School Counselors’ Use of Marcia’s Identity Status Theory for Career Advisement and Consultation and Collaboration. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matthew-Nice-2/publication/357062271_School_Counselors'_Use_of_Marcia's_Identity_Status_Theory_for_Career_Advisement_and_Consultation_and_Collaboration/links/61ccad3ce669ee0f5c7189a3/School-Counselors-Use-of-Marcias-Identity-Status-Theory-for-Career-Advisement-and-Consultation-and-Collaboration.pdf

Marcia, J. E. (1966). Development and validation of ego-identity status. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 3(5), 551-558. https://doi.10.1037/h0023281 Marcia, J. E. (2002). Adolescence, identity, and the Bernardone family. Family, Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, 2(3), 199-209. https://doi.org/10.1207/S1532706XID0203_01

Morsunbul, U., Crocetti, E., Cok, F., & Meeus, W. (2014). Brief report: The UtrechtManagement of Identity Commitments Scale (U-MICS): Gender and age measurement invariance and convergent validity of the Turkish version. Journal of Adolescence, 37(6), 799-805

Pisarik, C. T., Rowell, P. C., & Thompson, L. K. (2017). A phenomenological study of career anxiety among college students. The Career Development Quarterly, 65(4), 339-352. https://doi.org/10.1002/cdq.12112 

Pop, E., Negru-Subtirica, O., Crocetti, E., Opre, A., & Meeus, W. (2016). On the interplay between academic achievement and educational identity: A longitudinal study. Journal of Adolescence, 47, 135-144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2015.11.004

Sugimura, K., Niwa, T., Takahashi, A., Sugiura, Y., Jinno, M., & Crocetti, E. (2015). Cultural self-construction and identity formation in emerging adulthood: A study on Japanese university students and workers. Journal of Youth Studies, 18(10), 1326-1346. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2015.1039964 

Social support and career outcomes

 I have been noticing as I trawl through the literature, how often social support comes up as a predictor of positive career or work related outcomes and I thought I’d just highlight some of the key ways in which social support can impact positively on work and career.

It seems that social support can have a positive impact on people’s career choices, their ability to get the jobs they want, their subsequent satisfaction at work and their psychological resources that help with everything:

Career choices:

·       Social approval is an important determiner of occupational preferences

·       Other people have an impact on career decisions (relational career – Blustein / Schultheiss)

·       Social support correlates with career decidedness (Jemini-Gashi, Duraku & Kelmendi, 2019)

·       Social support predicts engagement with career planning (Hirshi et al., 2011)

·       Social support predicts career exploration (Turan et al., 2014)

 

Getting jobs:

·       Social support helps people to get jobs

·       There is a moderately strong positive relationships between social support and self-esteem, general self-efficacy, and job search self-efficacy (Maddy et al., 2015)

·       It predicts job-search intention and motivation (Van Yperen & Hagedoorn, 2003)

·       It positively relates to job-search intensity and employment status (Van Hooft et al., 2021)

At work:

·       The people we are surrounded by have a huge impact on job satisfaction -co-workers, managers, having a ‘best friend’ at work (Rath & Harter, 201)

·       Connections have an impact on episodic happiness at work (Yates, forthcoming)

·       More social support leads to more satisfaction with career choices (Murtagh et al., 2011)

·       Social support helps lead to a positive outcome of a career shock

·       Friend and co-worker support enhances self-efficacy and through that, has an impact on resilience at work (Wang et al., 2018)

·       Social support makes dissatisfied employees more likely to engage in job crafting

·       Social support enhances work self-efficacy (Korte, 2017)

·       Coping strategies (Ito & Brotheridge, 2003)

Psychological resources:

·       Social support has a positive impact on career optimism (Eva et al., 2020)

·       Positive relationships between social support and self-esteem, general self-efficacy (Maddy et al., 2015)

·       Social support enhances career adaptability (Wang et al., 2015)

This feels like quite a list, to me, and I am quite sure that a bit more effort would have got me much further. We are social animals, aren’t we? And if we’ve evolved to seek out friends and to make connections this is bound to have a wide range of positive benefits for us. Still, I find it’s quite interesting to consider what an influence other people have on so many aspects of our careers.

I wonder what this means for us as career practitioners? What do we do at the moment to foster these kinds of connections? Career work generally takes place in both one-to-one and group contexts, but to what extent do we actually do much in these group settings to try and foster a culture of group support? And are there any other strategies we could adopt to help our job seekers to learn how to develop their own social networks?

I’ll carry on adding to this list as I find new papers – it would be interesting to see how wide the impact of social support is, in career terms.

Career Shocks

There seems to be quite a lot of interest about the whole idea of career shocks in the literature at the moment, so I thought I would try and unpick it to provide a summary. 

What is a career shock?

A career shock happens when an unexpected external event makes you start to question your own career. A career shock can be defined as ‘a disruptive and extraordinary event that is, at least to some degree, caused by factors outside the focal individual’s control and that triggers a deliberate thought process concerning one’s career’ (Akkermans, Seibert, & Mol 2018, p.4). From a career-theory perspective, a career shock is a good example of the interplay between agency and structure – the shock is external (that’s the ‘structure’ bit) but the response is internal (which is where ‘agency’ comes in).

What kinds of shocks are there?

Career shocks can come from all angles. They can personal or interpersonal, within the organisation or outside it. Examples include of the death of a parent, getting a promotion, not getting a promotion, relocating because of a spouse’s job, having children, illness, an economic crash, a pandemic, being made redundant, an earthquake, or unexpected exam results. Career shocks can be negative, such as losing one’s job or a close relative passing away, or positive, such as receiving an unexpected promotion or receiving an award.

What is the impact of a career shock?

Career shocks can lead to both positive and negative changes. Most research suggest that shock valence (ie the emotions you feel about the shock itself) is related to career outcomes (Akkermans et al., 2018), so positive career shocks lead to positive career outcomes and negative shocks to negative outcomes. Kraimer et al. (2019) found that positive career shocks (e.g., receiving a research reward), were related to higher levels of career satisfaction and work engagement among academics, and Blokker et al. (2019) showed that negative shocks undermine the relationship between career competencies and perceptions of external employability in young professionals. Negative career shocks have also been shown to have a detrimental impact on career optimism and job security (Hofer, Spurk & Hirshi, 2020). But this is not always the case and some studies show that negative shocks can lead to positive career outcomes, in particular for those who weren’t all that happy in their jobs in the first place, but who needed an external push to motivate them to take action. For example, Rummel et al. (2019) demonstrated that negative shocks (e.g., being passed over for an anticipated promotion), can lead to longer term positive outcomes such as starting a successful business. And even positive shocks do not invariably lead to positive outcomes – Korotov (2020) showed that positive shocks can cause ambivalent reactions.

Why does a career shock have an impact?

The career shock can have an impact on the choices an individual makes (eg Nair & Chatterjee, 2020, Rummel et al., 2019), their psychological resources including their levels of optimism (Hofer et al., 2020) or sense of agency or their levels of person-job fit through an impact on either demands or resources (Pak et al., 2020). The jarring impact of the shock can also trigger some in-depth reflection about their career path.

Not all shocks are created equal: the bigger the shock, the more destabilising properties it has.

An individual’s pre-existing feelings about work seems to influence the kind of reaction that they had to the shock: People who were satisfied at work pre-shock are more likely to be prompted to do some rational, conscious critical reflection about their careers and their next steps. Those who were dissatisfied pre-shock were more likely to fling themselves spontaneously into action after the shock. For people who felt neutral about their jobs, a career shock can make them realise that they weren’t happy – as the literature says, the shock can surface latent disquiet.

Career shocks and Covid-19

COVID-19 has of course caused a range of different kinds of career shock – both positive and negative. Some people are working harder than ever, some people have lost their jobs, some people can only work from home, and some people have to reinvent how they work (Kniffin et al., 2020). For many the pandemic has given them the space to reflect on their careers, and perhaps to re-evaluate their priorities and values.

How to help following a career shock:

The literature seems to offer a number of suggestions for working with career shocks. First there are some suggestions for things that people can do to shock-proof their careers – traits or skills they can develop which will help them to cope if they do face a shock:

• ·       Good existing levels of psychological resources (social capital, human capital, identity and resilience) can help people to cope better when facing unexpected events.

·       High levels of career adaptability make it more likely that people experiencing career shocks (even negative ones) will end up thriving in their careers (Mansur & Felix, 2020)

• ·       A protean career orientation – one that is self-directed and values driven has been shown to help people to cope when external events surprise them.  

 Then there are suggestions for coaches working with career-shocked clients:

• ·       A career shock often ends up being about a person’s values, and writing sessions can be a great way to help people to identify and articulate what matters to them.
• ·       Time to think. The evidence is clear that taking a bit of time out to reflect on what has happened, on your career journey so far and on your hopes for the future can
• ·       Social support - both a significant other, and a social circle both help with the process of critical reflection (Wordsworth et al., 2021)
• ·       Identity work is what is needed to help people to capitalise on the disruption of the career shock. A clearly articulated continuous identity is particularly important as a way to maintain a sense of a coherent self whilst coping with a transition – a strong sense of identity can help people to see a continuous thread between what they used to do and what they are having to do now.
• ·       Developing career competencies can enable individuals to better capitalize on positive career shocks (Blokker et al., 2019).

And finally, ideas for organisations, to help ensure that their career-shocked employees stay productive and engaged:

• ·       Mentoring can help people to focus on possible future selves
• ·       Organisations who allow or encourage job crafting can help people adjust their work to be more aligned with their identities
• ·       Organisation or supervisor can help them to a better P-O fit (Pak et al., 2020)
• ·       Job embeddedness can buffer the effect of negative shocks on turnover, so keeping your teams close-knit can help (Burton et al., 2010)

 

Further Reading

Akkermans, J., S. E. Seibert, and S. T. Mol. 2018. “Tales of the Unexpected: Integrating Career Shocks in the Contemporary Careers Literature.” SA Journal of Industrial Psychology 44 (1): 1–10. doi:10.4102/sajip.v44i0.1503

Akkermans, J., Seibert, S. E., & Mol, S. T. (2018). Tales of the unexpected: Integrating career shocks in the contemporary careers literature. SA Journal of Industrial Psychology, 44(1), 1-10.

Akkermans, J., Richardson, J., & Kraimer, M. (2020). The Covid-19 crisis as a career shock: Implications for careers and vocational behavior. Journal of Vocational Behavior https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001879120300592

Ghosh, R. (2021). Protean career orientation and career shock due to the pandemic: HRD’s role in supporting intersectional identity work. Human Resource Development International, 1-3.

Hite, L. M., & McDonald, K. S. (2020). Careers after COVID-19: challenges and changes. Human Resource Development International, 23(4), 427-437.

Hofer, A., Spurk, D., & Hirschi, A. (2020). When and why do negative organization-related career shocks impair career optimism? A conditional indirect effect model. Career development international.

Korotov, K. (2021). Executives and career shocks: observations from coaching practice. Career Development International.

Mansur, J., & Felix, B. (2020). On lemons and lemonade: the effect of positive and negative career shocks on thriving. Career Development International.

McKenna, S. (2021). Career shock: the profound effect of COVID-19 on four Australian middle managers. LSE Business Review.

Pak, K., Kooij, D., De Lange, A. H., Meyers, M. C., & van Veldhoven, M. (2020). Unravelling the process between career shock and career (un) sustainability: exploring the role of perceived human resource management. Career Development International.

Rummel, S., Akkermans, J., Blokker, R., & Van Gelderen, M. (2019). Shocks and entrepreneurship: a study of career shocks among newly graduated entrepreneurs. Career Development International.

Wild, B. (2021). Covid-19 as a career shock and its influence on career development for nurses in the Netherlands.

Wordsworth, R., & Nilakant, V. (2021). Unexpected change: Career transitions following a significant extra-organizational shock. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 127, 103555.