How to work out what matters to you in a career using Kelly's construct theory

Kelly's construct theory is one of my favourites. Kelly was a psychologist who published his theory in the 1950s. His theory is a constructivist one and fits in well with the current thinking in career development. The starting point is that each of us 'construes' the world in our own particular way. We can't possibly pay attention to everything and we don't all value things in the same way, so we each have our own set of filters which enables us to focus (notice and analyse) only on the aspects about the world which matter to us. These Kelly describes as your personal constructs. This on its own doesn't sound particularly ground breaking (although I don't mean to do him down - it was probably quite innovative in the 1950s!), but Kelly has a couple of other things which I think are really useful. The first is that Kelly suggests that to really understand what you mean by a particular construct, you need to conceptualise it as a bi-polar construct - you need to identify its opposite. Take the example of 'friend': for one person, the other end of the scale could be 'acquaintance', and for another, it could be 'enemy'.


The second thing that Kelly brings is his technique for identifying what your particular constructs are, which he does through something called the Repertory Grid. The Rep Grid can be used to identify your personal constructs in any element of your life - you could use it to identify what matters to you in friendships, in holidays, in yourself, but in a career context, it can be used to get clients to think about how they conceptualise the world of work, and what matters to them in a job.


I had a go at using it to identify what I want from a job, and I'll share it here as an illustration.


First you need to identify some 'elements'. Here I have used a handful of the jobs I have had in my life, but it might be even more useful to get your clients to think of a broader range of jobs - perhaps those which their friends and family do, or just ten or so which spring to mind. Then, placing it on a grid, so that you can keep track of things, you need to take three of them (any three in any order) and identify a quality which two of the jobs share and one does not. Having identified this, you need to put a name to the opposite of that. Keep doing this with different triads of jobs, until either you run out of triads, or you find you keep coming up with the same constructs. This will then give you a list of your personal work constructs.


Here's what mine look like:

	Lecturer	Head of Careers Service	Retail manager	Careers Adviser in HE	Receptionist	Typist	Filing Clerk
Interesting	X	X	X					Dull
Core				X	X	X		Peripheral
Meaningful	X		X				X	Meaningless
Influential		X		X	X			Not influential
Sociable			X			X	X	Isolated
Intellectual status	X			X			X	No intellectual status
Long term strategy		X			X	X		Immediate

So, you can see that I've used seven of the jobs I've had (Lecturer, Head of Careers Service, Retail Manager etc) and then taking three at a time I've identified a quality which two of the roles shared and one didn't. So in the first line, I've compared lecturer with head of careers service and retail manager, and identified that I experienced two of these as interesting jobs, and one as a dull job.


This has then given me an interesting list of my personal work-constructs, suggesting that when I look at a job (any job) I analyse it in terms of these qualities. It's not quite that these are important to me, it's more that this is just the way that world is for me.


If a client ended up with a list such as this, it might be a useful place to start a conversation which genuinely means something to them.


There is one final element which Kelly suggests which could help, and this is something he calls 'laddering'. This is a technique which focuses their thinking even further and aims to get at some higher-order constructs. Here you ask your client why each of the constructs is important to them, and then again, get them to describe the opposite. For me this didn't work very well with interesting / dull because it's an end in itself, but when I asked myself why I liked the idea of a role which is core rather than peripheral, I was able to identify that it makes me feel it's more meaningful.









 
Fransella, F. and Dalton, P. (2000) Personal Construct Counselling in Action London: Sage


Kelly, G.A. (1955/1991) The Psychology of Personal Constructs New York: Norton. Reprinted by Routledge, London 1991