Because you're worth it

The pay of the wealthy in our society has barely been out of the press in the last couple of years. Bankers salaries and bonuses have been attracting horror for some time, but in the last couple of weeks there's been some stories about the relative pay of those at the top and those in the middle. Our bosses, it seems, have been getting richer, with the top bankers now earning 74 times the average wage in their organisation, compare to 14 times in 1980.

Our relationship with money, and more specifically salaries, I think is quite a complex one. I've been having a read of some of the careers literature that touches on salaries to find out exactly what we feel about what we earn.

Evidence shows us that salary has a tiny and non-significant correlation with job satisfaction, so it doesn't make us any happier in our work. It has a slightly larger correlation with life satisfaction - so although is won't make your work life any better, you could argue that you might want a higher salary not to improve your working week, but to allow you to enjoy yourself a little bit more at the weekends. Jobs that pay higher salaries are more likely to enhance some of the work environment qualities that lead to higher job satisfaction (such as task variety) but are likely to decrease some others (such as relationships with colleagues) so overally salary doesn't even indicate greater job satisfation, let alone bring it by itself.

So money neither brings nor symbolises greater work satisfaction.

Nor, as I was astonished to find out, does it even make you happier with your salary. Pay has only a small correlation with pay satisfaction, which means that the big cheeses in your firm earning more than 100k a year are no more content with their salaries than the lowly junior clerks on less than 20k. This is really counter-intuitive, but when I think about my own career history, it begins to make more sense to me.

I think that I've always been sort of content-ish with what I earn, even though my salary has gone up and down quite considerably in my working life. In fact the time when I have been most pleased with my salary was when I was 15 and played the piano for a local ballet class, earning nearly twice what some of my friends did in their Saturday shop jobs, but still the lowest paid job I've ever had. And I think the key here is that our satisfaction with our salaries is relative. It's not about "what do I earn?" it's about "what do other people in my community earn, and how do I compare?". There is plenty of evidence that it's pay differences that make people troubled about their own wealth rather than money itself -big differences between rich and poor in a society make for unhappy countries. And I don't know if this strikes a chord with you, but I most often question my salary when I am spending time with my management consultant / lawyer friends, rather than my usual public sector crowd.

There was one study that was conducted at Harvard, which asked whether the students would prefer to earn a particular high salary or to earn a lower sum of money, but be guaranteed that they were earning more than all their classmates. Almost without exception, the students choose the relative wealth rather than the absolute wealth.

So what's it all about? Why are so many of us so concerned with our salaries? Why is it important for us to earn money, more money than we did before and more money that other people?

I guess it's all about a feeling of self-worth. Enshrined in all aspects of our culture is that we pay more for better things, and salaries are perceived as no exception to this. The more you are paid, the better you are. So we strive for better pay not because it makes us happier, or more fulfilled, or because it leads to more interesting jobs, or because of what we can do with it, but simply because it makes us feel valuable. And hey, we're worth it.

Sacked!

Not me. At least, not as far as I know. But I have been reading some bits and pieces about the whole notion this week. There isn't all that much that I could find that's been written about it - I guess beause it's hard to find large numbers of willing participants, but I'd be really pleased if anyone knows of any research or could direct me to something that might be interest. In particular I'm really trying to find out what impact being sacked has on career trajectories - do people's careers recover, and if so what factors contribute to a successful future career?

There has been quite a bit written about what happens when CEOs are sacked, some of which is quite interesting. One paper ( Ward et al 1995) found that the age at which the CEOs are sacked makes quite a difference to their future career path. The very worse time to be sacked is, apparently, in your fifties. Earlier than that, and you have a high chance of finding another similar CEO role, and from 60 onwards, you're in a pretty good position to find one or more advisory positions, but in your fifties, you appear to be caught between the two - possibly seen as too old for a CEO post and too inexperienced for an advisory role. But the paper doesn't make it clear whether these career paths are specifically linked to the fact that the participants in the study were sacked.

The other thing the paper looked at is whether the reason for the sacking made a difference to the future career path of the CEOs. The authors classified the reasons for sacking into two categories - reasons which might be thought of as negative (e.g. fraud, poor performance, misconduct etc) and those which might be thought of as neutral (such as taking responsibility for someone else's mistake, leaving after a takeover or going on a point of principle), and found that CEOs sacked for "negative" reasons were only marginally less likely to find successful future positions than those who were sacked for neutral reasons.

I found another paper looking at sackings in young people (Kellner et al 2011). It didn't follow participants' careers after sacking, but provided quite an interesting analysis of the reasons for the sackings. Now it must be borne in mind that the analysis was based entirely on the reports of those who had been sacked, (althogh the researchers seemed to use quite thorough interviewing skills to try and unearth the details of the circumstances, and it was quite a large sample n=1259) but the reasons for sackings were to my mind, quite shocking, in terms of the widespread non-compliance with equal opportunities legislation. The most common category of reasons was "leave or personal circumstance" of which the biggest categories were sick leave and injury. Many of those sacked for taking sick leave took only a single day's leave and 1/5th provided a medical certificate to explain their absence. Of those sacked for or following an injury, 4/5ths sustained their injuries at work, as part of their duties. The quotes from participants were astonishing, one participant, for example, saying "chemical burns at work to eyes and stomach. Coerced into resigning when put in Work Cover claim".
The final category I'm going to mention is that 60 of the participants had been sacked for being pregnant, in general when the women suffer from morning sickness.

Discrimination, alive and kicking.

Kellner, A., McDonald, P. and Waterhouse, J. (2011) "Sacked! An investigation of young workers' dismissal", Journal of Management and Organisation 17 (2) 226 - 244
Ward, A., Soonenfeld, J.A. and Kimberly, J.R. (1995) "In Search of a Kingdon: determinants of subsequent career outcomes for chief executives who are fired" Human Resource Management 34 (1) 117 - 139

Judgement or judgemental?

Following my shockingly judgemental title to my last post ("The Armed Forces: why would you?"), I have been thinking quite a bit about this both with reference to myself and to career coaching. It's a kind of given that as career coaches we should be non-judgemental - how can we do our jobs with integrity and do the best for our clients if we are busy thinking about our own values and preferences. All clients must be treated with great and authentic respect, and this simply can't happen if we are judging them by our own criteria. But  now I am wondering if this ideal is not only unrealistic, but perhaps not even always desirable?

So let's turn first to whether an entirely non-judgemental approach is entirely desirable. I'm not going to go into the pluses of a non-judgemental approach - I think they're pretty self-evident, so I'm going to restrict my comments here to the possible negatives. As career coaches, we need to be analytical about our clients and their situation and we need to exercise good judgement. I feel that I use these skills to help me decide whether I need to steer my client who does not appear to be academically suited to medicine to consider a Plan B, whether I should be encouraging my unrealistic client to arrange some work experience, or whether I am going to spend some time getting my client to think bigger and broader about their career options. Now I would always always take these decisions from a fundamentally client-centred stand point, and would be quite aware of the need to be very cautious about any assumptions (who am I to say that the client won't bring it out of the bag at the last minute and getting straight As in their science A levels?). And I stand by these decisions - I think without a career coach using their instinct and analytical ability to manage the process then the intervention risks being far less productive. But is this not clear evidence of judgements? I am judging my clients' academic ability, knowledge and ambition. And where does judgement become judgemental?

Secondly, I wonder if it's ever going to be realistic. As career coaches, values mean a lot to us, and we are in general a pretty self-aware bunch. And I'm just not convinced that self-aware, values-driven people can ever be truly non-judgemental. Let's take the army example to illustrate my point: there are a number of reasons why the army and I are not a match made in heaven. Some of these reasons are simply due to my preferences, and I can quite understand and fully respect people who have difference views to mine (I might prefer to pull my eyelashes out one by one than lauch myself on to an army assault course, but I do understand and can genuinely admire that others might really enjoy the challenge). But other reasons - well, one in particular, are based on my moral code: I think it is wrong to kill people in the circumstances that our soldiers often have to. So how can I not judge someone else who has a different perspective? To me it's not something that I can take or leave, or something that I can see humour in, or something that I can understand - I think it's wrong, and I can't see how I can respect a decision that I think is fundamentally immoral?

Now of course, the decision isn't the person - I can see my way to respecting the individual, and finding plenty to admire in their bravery, their patriotism etc, and of course I can put my own views on hold for the purposes of the coaching relationship. But it remains that there is a non-judgemental streak that I can't see a way through.

In my musings I have found the kernel of some explanation, and I think it lies in empathy. I think that in a good coaching session, where the relationship has formed well, and the coach is really in tune with the coachee, empathy can form a short term bridge from coach's values to coachee's values. I think that we can get in our client's shoes and start looking at the world from their point of view. It's not that we change our values or moral stance, but just that for that short time, we are so in tune with our client that we start seeing the world through their eyes. It's not a route to actually being non-judgemental, but I think that for me it's a route to being able to ignore my own values for a short time to support my client.

I do think this works - I do some voluntary work on a telephone line where I speak to and give emotional support to a great range of people, some of whom behave in ways that I really, fundamentally abhor, and I think this focused empathy is my way of relating to them. It allows me to see the situation exclusively from their perspective, regardless of the bigger picture which forms the basis of my own moral perspective. And it seems to work.

So I think from my perspective, it's not quite a non-judgemental approach that I espouse or even aspire to, but self-awarenss, a client-centred approach and really really focused empathy. For me that feels more realistic and more helpful to my clients, but it's not truly non-judgemental.

Am I ok with that?

The Armed Forces. Why would you?

OK OK I know that's a REALLY judgemental title, and we all know that being non-judgemental is a crucial part of the ethical career coach. But I think many of us would agree that a career in the the armed forces is like no other, and that it's one of those career options that polarises people: those drawn to it can't imagine doing anything else, and those not, can't imagine doing anything worse.

Anyway, regardless of anyone's personal views, I did some research this week on what factors make people join the armed forces, and thought you might find it interesting.

There are a number of research papers that have looked at this over the last couple of decades, all coming up with pretty similar findings. The paper I most enjoyed was one by Woodward and Jenkins (reference below) who used a research method called photo-eliciation. This isn't a research method I know much about, but I really liked the way it was used in this study. The researchers asked a range of military folk to bring in 10 or so photos that for them summed up their time in the forces. They were then asked to talk about the photos, why they'd chosen them, what happened, what it meant to them etc..

Their research whittled it down to three key aspects of people's identity in the forces. Linking this with Ibarra's theories on career identities, these three points may well have a significant role to play in the career decisions and job satisfaction of those who are contemplating a career in the forces.

So the first one is professional expertise, and in particular, professional expertise that has a military dimension - so things like expert marksmanship, or being able to manoeuvre a vehicle under intense pressure on difficult terraine. A key element of this is the idea of physical endurance and survivial - the photos that the subjects brought often involved images of the subjects exhausted and dirty after an exercise.

The second is something the researchers refer to as fictive kinship. The concept here is that the military becomes a new and often better family. The subjects talked often about the idea that the relationships with their colleagues were as close as brothers, and that it was this that could motivate them to fight on the front line in a way that nothing else could.

The final aspect of military indentity is the notion of participation in a military event, and in particular a military event that means something to the rest of the nation. For example the subjects talked with great pride about being part of events such as the Falklands, which people outside their professional circles knew about and followed.

One further issue that interested me was the importance, or as it turns out, the lack of importance that the military subjects put on the idea of patriotism. The idea of fighting for one's country seemed to be something that is accepted as being there for all those who sign up, but it wasn't something that was overtly mentioned, and doesn't seem to be a major motivating force for those who join the forces. There were suggestions in the data that one of the issues here is that a link has been established in the non-military world between patriotism and racism, and the subjects interviewed were very keen to down play the "Queen and country" element of the role, not because it wasn't important to them, but becuase they were anxious about the inference that others may draw from an overt show of patriotism.

This sparked a few questions off for me. Do all professional areas have equally specific and widely shared career identities? And are there any other fields whose professional identity is at all similar to the forces? What other fields would suit someone who for some reason can't pursue a military career - what other industries or roles could also fulfill the identites above? And given how challenging so many people find the process of leaving the forces and reintegrating themselves in to "civvy street", what extra support can this understanding of military identities and motivation allow us to give to our ex-forces clients?

Woodward, R. and Jenkins, K.N (2011) "Military Identities in the Situated Accounts of British Military Personnel" Sociology 45 (2) 252 - 268

A job for life? Have things really changed so much?

There is a lot of talk about the changing world of work, jobs for life and the fact that they don't exist any more. Everyone has a story about their Uncle Max / Father / Jim from down the road, who left school, joined the Gas Board / Post Office / Merchant Navy and left there with a gold watch on their 60th birthday, and comments that "you'd never get that now..." . There is in the press and in the world at large, an assumption that things aren't as they used to be, and as career coaches, we need to know what is going on and respond to it in our advice to policy makers, our theories and in our work with our clients.

So what exactly is thie new world of work? The new concept involves a number of key assumptions. First and foremost is the idea of a dramatic shift around job security (e.g. Arthur's Boundaryless Career). The accepted rhetoric is that a generation ago people assumed that they could stay with their first employer until they retired, but that the picture these days is much less certain, with job insecurity and periods of unemployment much more common. Individuals are thought to be likely to have more jobs in their working lives than was expected in the 1970s. Following on from this is the idea that individuals now need to take responsibility for their own career development and their continued employability, where a generation ago this was thought to be the role of the employer.

But does* the data back this up?

I've long been a bit sceptical about how much of a change there has actually been. My personal experience doesn't really give support to the idea of a dramatic shift - I know plenty of people in my parents' generation who had a whole range of jobs, and plenty of people in mine who have been pretty stable.

So I've done so rooting around and found some interesting bits of evidence. It’s not always easy to piece things together (e.g. there seems to have been quite a change in the way that data was collected in about 1992, making it a bit difficult to compare pre-’92 with post-’92), but here are a few statistics:

·         From 1975 – 1992 men’s average job tenure (i.e. average length of time in a single job) changed from 10.2 years to 9.9 years.

·         Women’s stayed static at 6.6 years during the same period.

·         From 1992 to 2006 average job tenure (men and women combined) increased from 8.1 to 8.8  years.

Now these stats may disguise some localized changes – it may be that particular career areas have changed more dramatically in one direction or another, but the broad picture is pretty clear. The concept of a job for life is no less accurate now than it was a generation ago. Careers are no less stable overall than they were 40 years ago. A job for life should not have been taken for granted in the 1970s and should not be ruled out today.

I need to get some more information on all this. I’d like to try and get some more directly comparable data that goes right through from the seventies to the present day. It would be good to see if we could compare different industry areas. And given that older workers tend to stay longer in jobs, what impact does the ageing work force have on these stats? And what about motivation? Are there any differences in people’s reasons for changing jobs over the decades? I’d also really like to know more about career changes as well as job changes. Identifying when a job changes becomes a career change is hard and this makes the data more tricky to find, but I bet it’s out there somewhere. Do let me know if you’ve come across anything in this arena.

So finally, what does this all mean to us? Maybe nothing. The developments in career theories that have assumed this idea of increased job insecurity focus on ideas that encourage control and self-efficacy, and you can’t argue with that. But really, don't we want career theories that work because they build on an accurate picture, rather than those that we find we can use despite their misunderstanding of the current picture? And are there any problems with us perpetuating a myth? Isn’t it our role to bring an objective and evidence-based voice to the debate? I'd love your views. 


* I know it should be "do" the data, but it just doesn't sound right...

Arthur, M. B. (1994) "The boundaryless career: a new perspective for organizational inquiry" Journal of Organizational Behavior 11 295 - 306

Burgess, S. and Rees, H. (1996) “Job Tenure in Britian 1975 – 1992” The Economic Journal 106 334 - 344
Rodrigues, R.A. and Guest, D. (2010) "Have careers become boundaryless?" Human Relations 63 (8) 1157 - 1175

Job Satisfaction - how much is in our genes?

As a career coach, job satisfaction is quite a big deal in my working life. It's my goal to work with my clients to try and find the options that are most likely to give them most job satisfaction, and I guess that running through all my work there has always been an assumption that job satisfaction is based on the interaction between the individual and the situation and is something that can be changed.

I have recently done some rooting around to find out some more about what factors make people happy at work, and have been surprised and a little troubled to find out how much of job satisfaction is based on personality - not match between personality and role, but entirely within the individual, and based on the kinds of personality traits that are, arguably, present at birth. The personality elements that seem to be consistently associated with higher job satisfaction are high extraversion and low neuroticism. And the proportion of job satisfaction that is explained by personality factors may be up to 45%; so not quite as significant as the work factors involved (which I think probably deserve another post all to themselves), but nevertheless pretty important. And this means that there are people who are highly likely to be happy at work and those who are highly likely to find work unsatisfactory, regardless of the specifics of each particular job.

So I have two questions around this. The first is whether I think this feels intuitively right to me. Now I'm very clear that my role as a career coach needs to be informed more by evidence than instinct, but I do struggle a bit when the two really contradict each other. And when I think about my own career history, I can point to jobs that I really loved and those that made me utterly miserable. This of course isn't utterly at odds with the strong influence of personaly, as the research is suggesting that it's just under half of the reason for the level of job satisfaction, but still it makes me question it. Thinking about other people I know, and clients I have had, it begins to ring more true to me. I know people whose levels of contentment with work seem to be pretty consistent, as they move from one job to another.
I wonder what your experience is? Both in terms of yourself and others you know.

Now my other issue is, what do we, as coaches, do about this? If the single biggest factor, and nearly half of the whole concept of job satisfaction is written in the stars, then what impact does this have on our work?
Perhaps this is something that we just ignore? We can't do anything about it, nor can our clients, so what's the point of addressing it, let's just stick to the areas where we might genuinely make a difference? Or might it be something that we share with our clients? Perhaps a clients whose personality makes it more likely that they will be happy at work might be reassured to know this? Or do we just clock it ourselves and use it to inform our practice - ensuring that clients whose personalities are less likely to lead to work satisfaction are clearly encouraged to focus more on the areas that they can control?

I'd love your views!

For more information have a look at Ilies, R. and Judge, T.A. (2003) On the heritability of job satisfaction: the mediating role of personality. The Journal of Applied Psychology 88 750 - 709

What this blog is all about

Career Coaching and Career Coaches seem to polarise people. There are sceptics a-plenty: those who see it as over-priced, under-regulated and a-theoretical. And then there are the evangelists, for whom career coaching is an almost alchemic process, magically transforming lives. The truth, as we know, is somewhere in between. Can it help? Without doubt, yes. But is it consistently the best it can be? Well I would say no. And that is where I think this blog can come in.
My background is as a careers adviser, and I now work as a lecturer and researcher in career guidance as well as running an MA course in career coaching. One of my great frustrations is that these two worlds seem to have so little contact, and even so little respect for each other. The world of career guidance, or vocational psychology as it is known in the US, where much of the research comes from, produces vast quantities of empirical evidence every year. I reckon there are probably over 800 papers published each year by academics across the world, looking at specific elements of career choice, career development, answering questions such as "what makes us happy at work?" "what's processes lead to the best career decisions?" and "how can we best support our clients in their career quests?".
I have to read these papers (well some of them...) for my job, and I'm really keen to provide another channel of communication between the academic world and the vocational psychology and career coaching worlds.
I'd love to know what you think. Do you feel that the career coaching profession could benefit from a bit more academic rigour? What kinds of subject areas do you think we need to know more about?
What about the link between coaching and careers advice? Do you think coaches would benefit from closer links, or are the two better off independent?