How to identify your vocation?

The notion of a vocation is one that the career scholars have been thinking a lot about over the past decade. Dik and Duffy, who seem to be the academic leading lights on this topic, have recently published a paper summarising what we have found out and what is yet to come.

From a practitioners perspective, there is a huge gap in the research. It’s all very well knowing how marvellous it is for individuals who have found their vocation (and the list of benefits is huge - not only job satisfaction, but life satisfaction, better health and a whole host of others), but what we’re really interested in is how can we help clients to find theirs. The literature seems pretty sketchy on this point, but there are a few ideas put forward which we might be able to work with.

First it could be helpful for clients to simply know a bit about what it is. It might be useful for a client to know that one's vocation can be measure on a continuum - it's not something that you either have or don't have, but something that you can have a bit of, or a bit more of. It might seem a bit unrealistic for some clients to think that they ought to find their whole life purpose in their job, but moving a degree or two towards a vocation could feel a bit more achievable and could have some real benefits.

It could also be useful for clients to understand the three key elements of a vocation: First for it to be a calling, there must be a caller. Traditionally, this has often been conceptualised as a spiritual thing, but the caller could be anything - one's country, community, a group of people or a sense of destiny. Second for it to be a vocation, the purpose of your work needs to be very similar to you life purpose - so that the values driving the work-you, are the same as those driving the whole-you. And third there needs to be some pro-social element to the role - you need to feel that you are doing some good in some way - whether that is working with the vulnerable and needy, or providing bigger dividends to shareholders. 

Leading on from that last point, I think it's useful to remember that vocations don't need to be carey-sharey doing-good roles. Around a third of us have feel that we have a vocational orientation to our jobs, and this is pretty consistent for all occupations (surprisingly perhaps). I did hear one lovely story that illustrates this nicely. The cleaner at Nasa was asked what he did for a living, and his reply was 'I put people on the moon'.

So finally, just a few thoughts to bear in mind in discussions with clients. Duffy and Dik suggest that we should encourage clients to develop openness in new directions, to actively explore their interests, values and skills and think about how these match with potential jobs. Discussions around how jobs could connect with some kind of pro-social orientation could be fruitful - either thinking about what other jobs could have a pro-social orientation that chimes with their values, or thinking about ways to make their current jobs more socially orientated.

But there are still big gaps in our understanding of how interventions can help us identify our vocations. If anyone fancies doing a research project, do let me know!

Duffy, R.D. and Dik, B.J. (2013) Research on calling: what have we learned and where are we going? Journal of Vocational Behavior 83 428 – 436