Disabilities and the selection interview: discrimination and disclosure

Discrimination against people with disabilities seems still to be present in employment selection, but I was interested to read this week that not all disabilities are considered equal in the eyes of prospective employers. When compared to candidates without disabilities, candidates with physical disabilities tend to be rated most favourably in job interviews, with the highest employability ratings and the highest number of job offers.  The next most highly rated group are candidates with sensory impairments, and the least likely to be given a job offer are those with psychological disorders. This, I guess, reflects the stigma still very much associated with mental ill health and the lack of understanding and awareness that is so widespread in society.

Disclosure – whether to and when to disclose a disability can be a tricky decision. Some with a hidden disability prefer not to disclose at all to prevent the negative attitudes and discrimination that they feel is inevitably associated. Others prefer to disclose upfront, not wanting to drag themselves through a stressful process only to be rejected when their disability finally emerges. You might feel that you stand more of a chance of getting the job if you don’t disclose until after the job offer is in the bag, but you then risk starting a working relationships with your new manager on the wrong foot, as they may feel resentment at being misled.

Clients often ask advice on this tricky issue, and I've always felt a bit lost as to how to best answer their questions, but I've now found a few bits of evidence in the academic literature that can help me.

Candidates with visible disabilities (most studies have been conducted with wheelchair users) tend to do better in interviews if they make some verbal reference to the disability during the interview, but interviewers are more comfortable if this reference is made towards the end of the interview. Candidates with a non-visible disability are rated more highly in terms of how qualified they are and how likable they are if they disclose their disability at the start of the interview rather than at the end. 

It's interesting that there is such a clear distinction between what goes down well if your disability is visible, and what goes down well if it's not. It seems that an employer's primary consideration is that they do not want to feel that they've been misled, anything to do with how socially confomfortable they feel is secondary. A candidate in a wheelchair is hardly going to be accused of misleading an employer so the employer can then go to their second consideration, which is that they feel more comfortable discussing the disability after they have developed some kind of relationship with the candidate first. With an invisible disability, the employer is most concerned with whether or not they feel that they have been misled, and not mentioning the disability until the end of the discussion, is liable to make the employer feel that that have been duped in some way.

I don't think that I would give this information to a client in the form of advice (I seem to be pretty much against advice in most professional situations!) but I think the information could be really useful and empowering to clients as they reach their own conclusions.

The Golden Handshake?

Just a short one this time. I'm delighted to have found a paper that looks at the handshake in interviews and what impact handshakes have on interview outcomes!

The handshake does make a difference to your chances of getting a job offer. First of all, a handshake is more likely to lead to a positive employer rating than no handshake. But a good handshake is the best of all. A 'good' handshaker is one whose grip is full and firm, whose shake is vigorous and lasts some time and who maintains eye contact with the other person throughout.
Employers who receive this kind of desirable handshake are more likely to think the candidate is likable, warm and better qualified to do the job, and they are likely to think that they would be more satisfied with their choice if they hired this candidate.
Now that perhaps isn't a great surprise - we all know that employers (indeed, all of us) make judgments based on all sorts of nonverbal cues that aren't related to the job description.

Here's the bit that surprised me.

Handshakes actually are related to certain personality traits that are in turn linked to people's abilities to perform certain roles. A 'good' handshake correlates with an individual's degree of extraversion, emotional expressiveness, emotional stability and social confidence.

So then one final point which is about gender. There is a psychological concept of 'positive deviation'. This occurs when someone is particularly highly credited for doing something that they are not expected to do. In this case, women are not generally expected to give 'good' handshakes, so if they do, the employer gives them a particularly positive rating.

So, I'm not sure what that says about the validity and fairness of our selection procedures, but it's a great thing to be able to teach your nervous students as they prepare for their job interviews.

CVs - what do we think we know? And why do we think we know it?

One of the most popular services that career coaches offer is help with constructing a winning CV. And for some reason, there is a desire in clients, policy makers and practitioners to be a little more directive when it comes to CVs. Perhaps this is an arena where people imagine there are hard and fast rules, and see the career coach as the holder of the knowledge. Or perhaps it's a more practical issue that there tends to be quite a demand for this service and stakeholders are keen to capitalise on this popularity by treating it as an 'easy win'.

My philoshophical stance on this is that there is no more reason to be directive when it comes to CV checks than for any other career query, but I can quite accept that others don't share my view. What I do find curious is that although it's the one area that we seem to feel most confident about telling clients what to do, it's probably the one area where there is least empirical evidence to back our directions up.
There is, for example, loads of empirical evidence about what makes people happy at work, but most practitioners wouldn't dream of saying 'now I don't think you should apply for that job because there isn't much autonomy and so it's not going to make you happy'. We just wouldn't. But, we do seem happy to say 'I don't think you should include your Primary School education on this CV'. Even though there is PLENTY of empirical evidence that autonomy makes you happy at work, and NO evidence that inclusion of Primary school education scuppers your chances of getting an interview.

Anyway, I've been digging around the published studies about CVs and it's been quite surprising. The first surprising thing is that there is so very little published about this. I've found perhaps 20 or 30 papers published in peer reviewed journals, but over the course of the last 20 years, it hardly seems to be a hot topic. And if I thought it was sparse for CVs, the evidence on cover letters is much more scarce - I could only find one single study that explored what kinds of cover letters lead to interview. And of course, as usual, most of the research was conducted within the US, and most of it was based on the job searches of final year undergraduates (a very over-researched group because they are so easy for academics to survey) which is interesting, but not necessarily generalisable to all contexts.

The next striking finding for me, is that what employers think they like in a CV, is different from what they actually base their decisions on. There have been a few studies that have shown this, studies where the researchers have questioned the employers on what they base their decisions on, and then analysed the CVs that had actually been shortlisted, and looked at what made them stand out. In one study (Cole et al 1994) the employers said that they based their decisions on work experience and academic qualifications. In practice these employers actually shortlisted people based on their extra-curricular activities, and furthermore, the higher the academic qualification, the less likely a candidate was to be invited for interview. Other studies have shown that there is little interrater reliability in employers' views on CVs (ie two different people looking at the same CV, with the same job description in mind, are likely to end up with very different opinions on the candidate), and that employers make, generally pretty inaccurate judgments about candidates' personalities, based on the facts in the CV.

This mismatch between what recruiters say they do, and what they actually do I think is particularly interesting given that there are hundreds of books and articles purporting to give quality advice on CVs published every year. Many of these are written by people who have had little or no genuine credibility within this arena (and yes, I talk as someone who has written many articles and even book chapters on CVs, but have done only a small amount of recruitment from CVs myself, and until recently, had read none of the good quality research on the subject), and even the best of the books base their advice on the author's own experience of shortlisting from CVs, and on advice from other employers.

This is all another symptom for me, of the huge gulf that exists between academics and practitioners. Why are academics not publishing more about the topics that concern practitioners? And why are practitioners not basing their practice on the research? And I'm not sure what the answer is. Do University Careers Services need to become more like other University departments, where they are expected to produce research themselves? This would certainly make sure that practitioners are closer to the research, but quite where they would get the time, I'm not sure.... Any ideas?

How do I love thee? Let me count the Js

I've just read a paper that I found quite astounding. My first reaction was to check the date of publication to make sure it wasn't April 1st. My second was to feel al bit overwhelmed about how little I seem to still know about how we make career decisions. And my third was to start to feel that as career professionals we're up against it as we try to influence the career decision making processes of our clients.

The paper was by Ansel and Duyck, Implicit Letter Preferences in Job Choice,and was published in the Journal of Psychology (1999, Vol 143 (2)). It's based on something called 'name-letter' preference and this is the quite well evidenced finding that we have a preference for things that include the letters in our own names, in particular the initial letters. This preference has been shown to have quite an impact on all sorts of life decisions, such as where you choose to live (suggesting that it's no coincidence that my friend Viriginia lives in Virginia Water) and who you marry.

This paper was looking at the impact this name-letter preference on job choice. It illustrated first that within certain professions there is a higher incidence of people with similar sounding names: apparently, there are an unusual number of dentists called Dennis.
They also conducted some experiments to see what kind of organisations people are more likely to apply for, and found that people say that they are more likely to want to apply to organisations whose names are similar to their own. They conducted one experiment where they made up names of organisations that sounded very much like the participant's name showing for example, that a participant called Kelly, was more drawn to an organisation called Kelokoa nd another using names of real organisations, and showed, for example, that a participant called Jack would be likely to be drawn to a company such as Johnson's or John Lewis.
These effect size was small - the researchers are not suggesting that this is the main basis of most people's career decisions. But the effect is pretty consistent and does make a difference.

So what do we as practitioners do with this kind of information? Well, in truth, the effect size isn't big enough for us to worry too much about. But it makes me thoughtful about two different aspects of our practice. First it suggests that we still have very little understanding of how we make career decisions - for all the decades of research that has gone into the field, we're still nowhere near a complete understanding. The more I read about the research, the more irrelevant the safe and straightforward world of Holland's matching theories, but nothing as comprehensive and easy to understand has emerged to take its place. My second concern is about the huge impact that the unconcsious has on our decision making. Not that I'm suggesting that the unconsious has no part to play in the career decision making processes, but I just struggle to see exactly how our traditional practices can help. Our standard line is to address career issues at a conscious and rational level, but how can we compete with these kinds of unconscious processes that we are quite unaware of, and can't control?

Do you want a pay rise? Here's how...

Judge and Cable in the Journal of Applied Pscyhology last year (2011 vol 96) found some evidence to confirm all my worst fears about the relationship between women's weight and the workplace. Thin (by which I mean actively, unhealthily, under-weight) women, it seems, are paid significantly more than women at a healthy weight. The evidence suggests that for men, their pay tends to go up as their weight goes up, until their weight reaches obesity, when pay levels off and then decreases. For women, their pay goes down as their weight goes up, and does this particularly rapdily between 'thin' and 'average'. What is particularly striking about this study is that some of the data came from within-individuals. So as well as looking at the population as a whole (thin women tend to earn more than average women), they traced participants' earnings and weight throughout their careers, showing that as an individual woman's weight goes up and down, so her salary, correspondingly, is likely to go down and up.

Their explanation is all about the social desirability of body shapes. While men are thought to be undesirable both when they are too thin and too fat, a larger man, within the bounds of a healthy weight, is accorded more respect in the workplace. In contrast, for women, being actively thin is most socially desired and best rewarded.

Guilt can make you a better mother

Guilt is an emotion I don't have much time for. I'm all for people behaving well, but most of the time guilt serves no purpose except to lower your self-esteem, and more often than not, its provenance is some ridiculous social stereotype that you're not quite managing to live up to, or some idealised image you have in your mind of what you think other people expect.

But in the latest edition of the Journal of Vocational Behavior (which is mostly devoted to issues of work-life conflict and has loads of great articles), Cho and Allen have written a really interesting paper which suggests that guilt can lead to better parenting. In this study, the researchers looked at a group of over-worked, over-stressed parents and found (surprise surprise) that they spent less time actively playing with their children at the weekends than parents whose lives were stress free. But this effect was moderated by the parents' pre-dispostions to guilt. We each of us have a certain degree to which we are pre-disposed to feelings of guilt - some people become wracked with guilt at the mere sight of a piece of chocolate cake, or a forgotten birthday, whereas for others, it takes something pretty serious to get those guilty feelings started. The research suggested that although over-work normally leads to you playing less with your kids at the weekend, the guilt-ridden, stress-out parents still manage a good dose of what the researchers call "recreational and educational games".

Quite how that leaves time to put your feet up and read the paper, I don't know, but at least it's one less thing to feel guilty about.

Too much information?

Following on from my recent obsession with decision making, I've shifted a bit now to look at the bit before the decision - the bit where we try to make sense of all the information that we know.

The information we get about careers is huge, complex and quite daunting when you stop to think about it. We are fed information about different jobs, occupations, industries, and the economy at large from all different quarters a hundred times a day. Each time we contact a call centre, buy stamps from the post office or book an appointment with our GP we are feeding, confusing and expanding our knowledge of the world of work. So how do we start to make sense of it all?

We've developed quite a few clever tricks to help us cope. Some of them useful, and some of them perhaps less so.

We have developed a few unconscious strategies for dealing with the sheer volume of information. One strategy is  to focus in on a subset of occupations, making  a swift, ill-informed decision to look at jobs in, say, the media and then starting to do some more in depth research to decide between TV production and advertising. Alternatively we go for a single factor, and research that widely, for example, jobs with high starting salaries which could lead us to a choice between law and banking. We can become overwhelmed with choices, and as information increases, our awareness goes down. When the information goes beyond what we can manage we will restrict the processing that we do, to avoid cognitive stress.

We don’t always evaluate the information that we get with the cold, critical eye of an MI5 agent. ‘Hot’ information is much more appealing to us than ‘cold’ information. This is traditionally something that has been particularly associated with people from working class backgrounds, but it now seems clear that this effect is shown across all groups. Hot information is stuff you hear from people you know. Cold information comes from more formal sources such as government websites and career books. In career terms, we’re much more likely to base our view of how easy it is to make a success of a new business venture based on Uncle Bob’s thriving business, than on BIS’s website which states that 90% of new businesses fold within two years.

Occupational information tends to be gleaned from different sources, which will often provide different information, presented in different ways. When comparing occupations (or indeed other options), therefore you will often not have comparable information. You may, for example, know the starting salaries for all occupations you’re looking into, but only the levels of autonomy for one, and the typical hours worked for another. Factors which you can compare directly are given more weight in your mental calculations than others, regardless of how important the factors are to you. So in this case, even though autonomy might be the single most important factor to you, the conclusions you would draw from your research would be based principally on the starting salaries, because that is the one that you can compare directly.

I'm sure there are lots of other heuristics and short cuts that we take and I'll report back as I find out more. I think this is all really useful for us as coaches to know. The more that we understand about the way our minds work, the more we can work with our clients to help them to identify what information they should highlight and what to play down.

Back on track...

So I think I've got over my momentary lapse, my brief flirtation with the gut instinct. I'm back on track with my beloved and dependable rational logic.

I've been reading about all the biases that our gut instinct is prone to, and the experiments are in some way no surprise at all, and in another, really quite shocking.

One big issue, as far as researching career information is concerned, is tha halo effect, motivated reasoning and the idea of post-hoc rationalisation. These theories (I'm not entirely sure if they're slightly different concepts, or just different ways of looking at the same thing), all concern the idea that our gut instinct makes an early decision and then persuades us to look for rational explanations for it. We make an instinctinve decision, for example, that advertising is a job that we would like to do, and then when we're researching the career area, we are selective about the information that we attend to, highlighting perhaps the creativity of the role and dynamic environment, and ignoring the competitive entry, and long hours that you would have to work. This, together with our biased self-characterisation (which makes us rate ourselves more highly on characteristics that we've been told are desirable) leaves us with a very inaccurate picture of how suited we are to this particular job.

Gut instinct is also very, very susceptible to priming and suggestion. One experiment that highlights what a profound effect suggestion can have, asked some participants to wait in a room that had a computer in the corner with a screensaver that had a dollar sign on it, and compared their subsequent behaviour with a control group whose computer had no screensaver. The participants who had seen the dollar sign exhibited more individualistic behaviour that the control group - placing their chairs further away from others, and picking up fewer items to help a stranger who had dropped a pencil case, than those from the control group.

Another experiment showed that participants who had been asked to read some words that might be associated with age (such as "wrinkled", "faded") walked more slowly down a corridor after the experiments than participants who had been asked to read other words.

The list of experiments goes on and on. Another one asked participants to lie, either via email or on the phone, and then asked them to rate the desirability of various grocery products. Participants who had been asked to lie by email reported that they thought that soap was a more desirable product, and those who had lied by phone, prefered mouthwash.

The implications for career decisions aren't quite clear to me yet, but clearly with such clear, widespread and unconscious effects, our gut instinct is clearly not to be trusted. At least, not always, and not with such important issues as our career planning. Of course it is never quite as clear cut as writers would like you to think. There are problems with conscious logic, in particular, within the careers arena, with our brains ability to process the vast amounts of data involved in making a career decision (more on that another time...).

But for me, for now at least, I'm sticking with my view that, like democracy, relying on conscious, rational, analytical processesing is the least worst option.

Jam

I'm still on my quest to find out more about how we make career decisions, and to this end I'm reading a lot about decision making theory, and trying to work out how or whether it can be applied to career decisions.
I've read a couple of papers recently that have focused on jam!
The first one (Iyengar and Lepper 2000) questions the widespread acceptance of the idea that more choice is better. There have been plenty of studies that show the benefits of choice, improving one's perception of control, life satisfaction, task performance and intrinsic motivation. But these researchers point out that the studies compare having no choice, with having around 6 choices, and we just extrapolate from this that the more choice the better. Iyengar and Lepper asked people to consider buying expensive jam. In one context they had 6 different brands of jam to choose from, and in the other they had up to 30. They found that those with only 6 options were more likely to decide to buy something and were happier with their purchases than those who had more options.
So, the link to careers is in the number of different occupational choices available. Young people have around 3000 options to choose between in year 11. If people struggle to choose a jam to buy when they have more than 6 options to choose from, how on earth do we expect them to navigate through that number of potential routes?

The second jam experiment (Wilson and Schooler 1991) I came across looked at whether thinking and analysing decisions helps in the decision making process. Again it is generally thought that analysing a decision is a good way to help ensure that it's the right decision, but this experiment provides some contradictory evidence. In this experiment one group of participants were asked to taste 5 different strawberry jams, and to rank them in order of taste. The other group was asked to rank them in order of taste but also to write down their reasoning - which factors they considered and what their thoughts were. Those who make the instant and non-analysed decisions tended to reflect the jam-experts' views, suggesting that their decisions about the jam were pretty good. Those who had to stop and analyse their decisions ended up with views that were far less similar to the experts' views, suggesting that thinking about the process led to worse decisions.

Now this kind of information disturbs me. I have spent a lot of time trying to get clients to consider a wider range of options, and to really think about the decisions they're making. Is it possible that these two approaches actually make it harder for people to make good decisions?

Shoes and boyfriends

I'm coming up with a new theory. It might not yet be sufficiently fully formed to grace the pages of the Journal of Vocational Behavior, but I'm sure it has potential.

There is a huge gap in our understanding of how exactly people choose their careers. There are certain things that we know about some bits of our career decision making processes, such as the impact of our nearest and dearest, and we also know that there is far too much information about careers for our little brains to be able to process. What we don't quite know is how exactly we make the leap from these kinds of processes to an actual decision.

Brower and Nurius proposed the idea of schemas and niches for different occupations. The schema is your brain's own personal shorthand for everything it knows about a particular occupation, and the niche is the equivalent short hand for the lifestyle, choices and values that go along with that role. In one tiny spot, your brain wraps up a whole load of information relating to a particular job. The schema and niche are individual stereotypes which are based on social learning and continue to change as your experience of the world changes.

It seems to be easier for people to come up with detailed niches than detailed schemas for occupations: whilst many of us could picture a PR exec in our mind's eye (female, 28, polished, trendy, lives in London, travels by taxi, enjoys skiing, reads Grazia, studied English, quite posh), which of us could build up such a detailed picture of what this fabled woman actually does during the day at work?

My theory proposes that this niche is quite influential in people's career decision making. When considering different career options, people conjure up the niche of a PR exec and imagine themselves in that role, they try it on in their imagination, and see if they want to live that life. And whilst they do spend some time thinking about the day job that keeps this PR exec in Jimmy Choos, this is only one part of the possible self that they are playing with, and they find it harder to really drill down to the detail of the 9 - 5 than they do the weekend activities. So my suggestion is that the sorts of factors that really make the difference are things like what shoes they'd wear and what kind of boyfriend they'd come home to at the end of the day. If they feel that this lifestyle is the one that they aspire to and could really see themselves living, then they're more likely to give the job some serious consideration.

Now that's all a bit flippant, but I think there's something in it. What do you think?

Spilling my guts

I’m not at all sure about gut feeling. Perhaps this is because I’m not a very intuitive person: I don’t have feelings about things, can’t sense atmospheres and I’m not even sure that I’m a very good judge of character at first meeting. But this has never bothered me much as gut feeling isn’t something that I’ve rated terribly highly. My view (or perhaps my gut feeling…) is that our instincts are firmly grounded in logic, but conducted so fast that we don’t have access to the different logical steps in the process. There are good reasons for a feeling, it’s just that we can’t easily identify and analyse them. And as such, they are far more susceptible to the worst flaws of any other decision making style: prejudices, a bias towards the familiar, a failure to process all the information, a bias towards recent or surprising information etc etc.. As a career practitioner, I have spent some considerable time trying to bring clients back to the straight and narrow of rational decision making, and have always felt quite confident that I was doing them a great favour. I’ve been interested in their gut feelings, but have always tried to get them to analyse them and address the issues objectively.

But I’m gradually changing my views. Amundson wrote a great paper on the way that people actually make decisions, showing that 94% of us rely on the views of others in one form or other to make our career decisions. Now of course, just because we do make decisions this way, doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily the best way to do it, but the evidence seems to be clear that people at least perceive that their decisions are better if they’ve consulted widely.

And now I’m reading a book called “Gut Feeling” by Gerd Gigerenzer. I’m not utterly convinced by his style – he’s very enthusiastic about a whole range of metaphors to clarify (or perhaps cloud) his explanations, and also seems to be rather too full of anecdotes (“I once had a good feeling about something and it turned out to be right” Astounding!). But in between these rhetorical devices, there is some really interesting evidence about how and why gut feelings work. The message (I’m only a third of the way through, so I’ll come back with more at a later date) seems to be that gut feelings are based on logic, but it’s logic that is specially calculated to work both quickly and effectively. For example, gut instinct might focus on one element, rather than taking everything into account, but it’s usually the single most important element, and so the decision made by gut instinct stands up well when compared to that made through thorough logic. Gut instinct, this book argues, is particularly helpful in making decisions where it’s not possible to thoroughly process all the information (like, for example, job choices perhaps?) and for decisions that will inevitably be around shades of grey, rather than those with a definitive right answer (like, for example, job choices).

I remain skeptical but am beginning to accept the slimmest possibility that I need to reconsider…

Decisions, decisions

I think that the area of career decision making is, in general, much neglected. Interviews, careers ed programmes and professional training programmes tend to focus a lot on identifying strengths and values, working out what you want from a job, and generating options that might fit the bill, but the actual process of making the decision tends to be glossed over. There has been quite a lot written about the sorts of factors that are at play when people make decisions (rational, relational and post-rational), but I'm struggling to find anything that says which kinds of decision making processes lead to the best outcomes. Do please let me know if you know of any research in this arena.

My view is that this is quite a flaw in our collective knowledge. Actually making the decision is one of the hardest and more crucial parts of the process, and one where clients often get stuck, and surely we ought to have a bigger and better body of knowledge to help us help them?

Yesterday though, I stumbled on a really interesting paper (Iyengar, Wells and Schwartz, "Doing Better but Feeling Worse"). This paper looked a two different kinds of decision makers and the correlations between the decision making processes, and how good your decisions turned out to be. The two types of decision makers were the maximisers (who will put a lot of effort into making sure that they've found the best possible option) and the satisficers (who put less effort and thought in to the process, and are more likely to accept a less than perfect job). The measures of how "good" the decision turned out to be were objective success (based on how much they earned - I know, I know, that's a very flawed measure...) and how happy they were both with their decision making process and with their job.

The found that the maximisers i.e. those that we might think went through a "better" decision making process ended up earning more money, BUT found the decision making process less satisfactory and were less happy with their final decision than the satisficers.
The other group, who were less rigorous in their process, ended up on less money, but happier with their choice.

The researchers suggest that one of the problems for the maximisers is that because they considered so many suitable options, they ended up having to reject lots of really quite attractive job ideas, and the effort that they put into making a decision raised their exepctations - they felt that after all that deciding, they ought to have found the perfect job.

I think this is really interesting for us as professionals. The received wisdom is that clients should really think hard about choices, and should put in some effort to generating suitable options and researching ideas. But perhaps this isn't the right way? Perhaps we should be downplaying the significance of the choice, and encouraging them to give things a go? What do you think?

What makes you successful at work

I've recently found a paper that reports the results of a huge meta-analysis of the predictors of career success. It's not hugely recent, having been published in 2005, but as the sample size goes up to 45,000, I think it's still worth thinking about!
It looked at both extrinsic and intrinsic career success. Extrinsic was defined as both salary and promotion, and intrinsic was measured by career satisfaction.
So, what did they find?
Well, if you're after promotion, then you should be feeling pretty smug if your MBTI profile includes the letters E and T, as extraversion and logic are both strong predictors of a promotion. But if you're not blessed with this personality type, then you can up your chances if you get loads of training and work long hours.
Now if it's a high salary you're after (and it's interesting to learn that these two aren't as closely linked as you might imagine - with a correlation of 0.18), your cognitive ability is key, along with your educational level, the number of hours you work, and the number of years of experience you've clocked up.
If you want to be happy at work (and again there is a significant but relatively small correlation between satisfaction and both salary and promotion), an extravert personality will stand you in good stead (nearly all work environments involve a substantial degree of social interaction which satisfies the more sociable amongst us). On top of this, the amount of training you get, support from your supervisor and organisation, the degree to which you have engaged in active career planning, and an internal locus of control are all likely  to keep you chipper at work.
One interesting gender finding is that the link between education and success is stronger for women than for men. Make of that what you will!

I'm not sure how I feel about the idea that personality has such a strong link with these measures of success. I feel a bit uncomfortable about the notion that these are traits that we are born with, and that to some degree, your chances are limited or enhanced from an early age. And what do we, as coaches, do with this information? "I see you're an introvert, how very unfortunate...".

Life Events and Career Change: "I'm Adam, I'm a marine"

I've just read a really moving study on career changes that are caused by traumatic life events. The study looked in particular at ex-servicemen and women who have had to change their career direction following injury sustained in the line of duty. This was a great group of people to look at for two reasons. First, the life events involved were pretty dramatic. Many of us have faltered from our career paths throughout our working lives, but not many of us can blame our career changes on the fact that our legs were blown off in Iraq. The other reason that this group of participants were so interesting is that the professional identity of service men and women tends to be very tightly bound with their personal identity: they are their job, so a forced change is likely to be very challenging for them to cope with.

It's a qualitative study, so although you can't be confident about its generalisability, you get some really powerful insights. One participant had been a marine and his professional and personal identities were clearly very tightly linked. He said that he always introduced himself as "I'm Adam, I'm a marine" and now that he wasn't a marine any more, he didn't know what to say.

The researchers found that the career change left these participants lost in the world: their fundamental assumptions and understanding about what the world was and how they fitted into it were shattered.
The main message from the study was that these individuals needed to re-build a coherent narrative that linked their past lives to their future lives. They needed to find some thread that ran throughout their careers, that told a sensible story to explain how their new career built on, or at least sat comfortably with their old career. How they as a single individual could autentically be both a soldier and a teacher / police officer / career coach.

I don't think I've coached anyone who has had an experience such as this, but can imagine that a narrative approach to the interview could be really helpful.

Mother hood and part time working

I've been a bit silent on my blog for a few weeks now, but I was just doing some research in to the impact that motherhood has on women's careers and found some interesting bits to share.
One that irked, but perhaps didn't surprise me, was the evidence about part time workers. The first piece of information was about the workers themselves, and suggested that women are so very grateful at being allowed to work flexibly (or possibly so concerned to make a success of their flexible arrangements), that they put in more hours than they are paid for, and that because they don't suffer from work-fatigue, they are more productive per hour. Supervisor ratings for part time workers also tend to be higher. BUT when the researchers asked managers in general terms about part timers, they reported that they they are thought to be less committed, harder to motivate, harder to manage and less caring about their jobs, their departments and their customers. They tend to receive lower pay, fewer fringe benefits, fewer opportunities for promotion and less training and because they are less likely to be members of a Union, they have lower job security.

Managers also reported that they thought that mothers (full time or part time) were more likely to suffer from work-family conflict (e.g. having to leave work early to pick up children, taking days off when the children are sick) than either fathers or non-mothers, and that this (NB the perception not the reality) has a knock-on effect on their chances of promotion.

Humph, grump, grump etc.