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.