Evidence for Career Learning Frameworks

I find the whole arena of career learning frameworks rather complicated. My first challenge is that there are quite a few of them, and they are not, as far as I can see, collected together in one neat little document that I can look through. 

Then comparisons between them are tricky. They often overlap - sometimes using the same terminology, and sometimes using similar terms which might be synonymous, but might not. Other frameworks differ from each other so dramatically that it's hard to compare. Then then are some which have been devised for particular age groups, and it's hard to know to what extent they can be generalised.

But my biggest challenge is that there doesn't seem to be any (can this be right?) evidence that one framework is more effective than an other. So what criteria can we use to make a decision about which to choose? Not only is there this absence of an empirical base to distinguish one framework from another, there is also a lack of evidence to support the use of the particular elements of the frameworks. Take self awareness, for example. This is one of the most widely used elements contained within career learning frameworks, and is very well established as a key tenet of career education. But there is no evidence that a high degree of self awareness actually links to individuals getting a job, or getting a good job. 

There is plenty of published evidence of the factors that do link to positive outcomes from career interventions, and I was wondering, what would an evidence based career education framework look like?

Liu et al. (2014) have conducted a meta-analysis incorporating the findings from 47 studies looking at nearly 10,000 job seekers and this gives us a great starting point. Based on this (and some other studies) I have devised Yates's 5 Step 5 S Evidence Based Career Learning Framework, guaranteed (not really) to get participants into jobs.

Running throughout the framework are motivational elements (motivational interviewing and future time perspective) and active learning - getting participants to actually do stuff, not just sit and listen.

Step 1: Strategy
To be effective and job search needs to be strategic, with a good emphasis on planning. Participants need to start off identifying what job they want, which we might do through a Possible Selves intervention, which helps participants identify what kind of future they want and how to get there.

Step 2: Self efficacy
No job search is going to be very successful if the individual doesn't believe in themselves, so the sessions will include a number of exercises aimed at boosting job search self efficacy. Participants will be asked to share stories of success (their's or others'), will be encouraged to set themselves a lot of small goals that they can achieve, we might do a few cognitive behavioural exercises to help get rid of negative thoughts and the sessions will have a positive and encouraging tone to them.

Step 3: Social support
Job searches are most successful when people feel supported, so I will get participants to identify people who might be able to give them support and ask them to think about how they might harness this more effectively. I will also set up the career sessions in such a way as to encourage the participants to be a support for each other.

Step 4: Skills for job search
Participants need to learn the nuts and bolts of job hunting, so will be give the opportunity to find out where vacancies are posted (and encouraged to use a range of sources) and to think about what information they need and where they could find it. Participants will be encouraged to think about the the factors that lead to job satisfaction (being good at a job, having colleagues you like and having lots of variety).

Step 5: Self presentation
Participants will think about the way they want to come across on paper and in person and develop their best CV and practice interview skills.

So, what do you think? It's a bit tongue in cheek - I'm not really proposing that this 'back of an envelope' career learning framework should take the place over far more thoughtful and considered frameworks. But I'm quite intrigued by this. I wonder if it would work? 

Liu, S., Huang, J. L., & Wang, M. (2014). Effectiveness of job search interventions: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 140(4), 1009-1041

Should career group sessions always be interactive?

I'm thinking a lot at the moment about the best way to teach career education. Career training courses advocate an interactive approach to group sessions, with information interspersed with interactive exercises. My experience though suggests that in practice, career sessions tend to end up being more information based and lecture style than interactive. My view is shaped by my own practice, and my observation of colleagues, and although I'm sure there is probably a lot of really excellent interactive practice going on that I haven't come across, I wonder if in general our career group sessions should be more interactive?

Colleagues I speak to give a range of reasons for lecture style input: it's client expectations, it's big groups, it's time pressures. And this all has made me question whether this is actually the best way - are interactive exercises actually helpful? What makes me think they are any better than lecture style?

So I've found a paper. Michael (2006) has done all the hard work for me, and provides a summary of the evidence that active learning works. Michael's agenda is slightly different from mine. He is looking for the best way to teach science to University students whereas I am after good practice for career education. But even though we are not teachers, we are still in the business of getting our clients to learn, so I think there is a lot we can take from this evidence.

Michael comes out very much in favour of active learning, and feels strongly that not enough of it is seen in university education at the moment.  In his introduction he goes as far as to say "it would be difficult to design an educational model that is more at odds with current research on human cognition that the one that is used in most colleges and universities".

He presents the 'big five' findings from learning research which to my mind, make a pretty compelling case for keeping career workshops interactive.
1. Learning is all about integrating new information with old. We start with what we already know and add anything new we learn to what is there already. If new information is presented without any reference to existing information, then students don't have the opportunity to integrate the new with the old and learning is less effective.
2. Learning facts is different from learning to do something. Simply teaching the facts does not equip students to do anything with the facts. So telling students that filling their CVs with power words is a good idea is different from equipping them to change their CVs; they need to have a go at doing it and then get feedback on their efforts in order to develop the ability to do anything with the facts.
3. Transferring knowledge from one context to another is surprisingly difficult. Giving an example of how something should be done (eg hearing an excellent interview answer on its own does not allow students to see how they themselves should answer a question). Students need to see how they themselves would answer a tricky interview question in order to understand how to use the information.
4. People learn better when they learn together. Talking and listening to others leads to better learning than sitting and listening to a lecture.
5. Putting ideas into words helps people work out what they think.Interactive exercises allow people to talk about their ideas and in articulating them, their thoughts develop and crystalise.

If these really are the key findings from a generation of research about learning, then I think we need to pay attention. There hasn't been very much research into what works in a career context, but evidence in a range of academic disciplines seems to suggest that this is simply how people learn - and there is nothing to suggest that learning about careers  is any different from any other kind of learning.

My confidence is restored. Career sessions should always be interactive. They should always get participants to think about where they are now, and to build on their current position. They should include exercises where they put their own thoughts into words and share those words with others, and they should allow students to try out the skills they're focusing on, not just tell them the theory.


Michael, J. (2006) What's the evidence that active learning works? Advanced Physiological Education  30, 159 - 167

Goal Setting

I've known for some time that goals are good. We've long been told that setting a goal at the beginning of a coaching session is important, and that if we can encourage our clients to identify specific and measurable goals for themselves at the end of a session then they are more likely to put their plans into action. But it was good to read Locke and Latham's paper  (2002) which summarises the research on goal setting and explains why it works.

First, it's encouraging to note that there is good and solid and widespread evidence that it does work. Goals are linked with people putting in more effort and achieving more. And a specific goal results in more effort and better performance than simply encouraging someone to 'do their best'.

But there's more.

I had thought that it was crucial to set appropriate, ie moderate goals. Apparently not always. In general, the harder the goal, the more effort people put in and the more the attain. There is an issue about what this might do to people's confidence (of which more later), but broadly speaking, the harder the goal the better.

Locke and Latham explain how goals work:
1) they direct attention and effort towards the goal and away from other things - both cognitively and behaviourally ie, you think more about making sure that your efforts are linked to achieving the goal
2) they energize. And linked with the comment above, high goals lead to greater effort than lower goals
3) they affect persistence and in particular people carry on working for longer when the goals are hard
4) goals lead to better strategies. People either use strategies they already have, transfer strategies over or learn new strategies when they have a specific goal in mind.

Other important factors are:
Goal commitment
goal commitment strengthens the link between goals and performance. Goal commitment is enhanced when the outcome of the goal is important to the individual, and when the individual has high self-efficacy ie believes that they have the ability to achieve it.
Self-efficacy seems to come up all over the place, but helpfully the authors of this paper give some empirically tested methods for enhancing self efficacy. They suggest that the individuals need to be adequately trained (so that they do actually have the ability to achieve the goal), they need to see role models that they can relate to who have previously achieved the goal, and they need to be helped to develop specific strategies.
Feedback is important so that the individual can see how well they are doing and knows how much harder they need to try.
Task complexity has am impact. Goal setting works better for simple tasks. With complex tasks it seems to be more effective to set a range of small interim goals (ie one for each simple task involved).
Satisfaction: a goal seems to act as a sort of yardstick for satisfaction. Achieving or exceeding a goal leads to satisfaction and failing to meet a goal leads to dissatisfaction. This then presents us with a bit of a dilemma - there seems to be a choice that needs to be made between setting a challenging goal which is likely to lead to a higher performance or to set a lower goal which is likely to lead to higher satisfaction.

There has clearly been a huge amount of research conducted on goal setting, but I am pleased now to have a slightly clearer understanding of what it all means and how and why it works.

Locke, E.A. and Latham, G.P. (2002) Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35 year Odyssey American Psychologist 57 (9) 705 - 717

Careers information: is online the only way to go?

I was given a guided tour of LSE's lovely careers service this week, and was struck by the almost total lack of careers information within the service. Information about careers is now so widely available online, that they simply aren't using paper based information at all, so services have stopped holding it. This makes sense to me - there is no point in wasting space and time maintaining a careers library that no one uses. But I am concerned about the alternative.

The evidence tells us that we are all, in general, pretty poor at taking in information that we read. Studies time and again show us that the process of reading careers information is not massively useful to clients; what helps is the conversations with the practitioners they have before and after their research (Savard and Michaud 2005). This also fits with Vygotsky's theories about language and thought, which explain that our thoughts are crystallised through conversations: we only really know what we think when we have a chance to talk it through.

In the old days, a student would start their trip to the careers library by telling the librarian what they were looking for - this brief conversation helped them to be really clear in their own minds about exactly what they were trying to find. Some might then have an ongoing dialogue with the librarian throughout their visit, but even the most independent researchers would be asked to engage with a brief chat about whether they had found what they were looking for at the end of their visit, and this conversation might then lead to booking an appointment with a careers adviser to discuss what their new information means to them.

These conversations are what make the information meaningful and relevant, and they are what has been lost with the move from a paper based service to an online service.

So what can we do about it? The solution might be in the way that the online services are designed and managed. My very limited understanding of the potential of technology limits my imagination, but I am sure there are ways to work it better.Could we design websites that ask the right questions at the right time? Rather than letting people browse for themselves, could we ask them what, specifically, they are looking for before giving them access to the right information? Or could their web browsing trigger some interactive questions? Or even better, could it trigger some kind of real time, real person contact - actively encouraging interaction on each webpage? Could we get people to sign in with their twitter accounts so that we can tweet them whilst they are searching?

I wonder what innovative ideas other people have? There are probably some great websites out there that do these sorts of things really well. Do let me know if you've come across any.

Savard, G. & Michaud, M. (2005). The Impact of LMI on the Career Decision-Making Process: Literature Review. FLMM

Motivation - practical tools for dealing with fear

Following on from my previous post on the theory side of motivation, I wanted to add something about how this knowledge can be used in practice with clients.

One of the key messages from the theory is that it's not a lack of motivation we should be thinking about, it's barriers to motivation: the motivation is inevitably there, but we sometimes can't feel it because other things get in the way. In my experience, the key barriers are 1) fear, 2) absence of goals, 3) general depression / low mood and 4) lack of readiness.

I think these need a post each, so here is the first.

Fear

1) inference chaining or Socratic questioning (I'm not sure if these are different - they look the same when I do them, but I might well be missing something...).
This is a process of asking a series of questions which help your clients to get right down to the nub of the issue. Often the fear experienced by clients is not rational (I'm wincing a bit at that word - but I hope you know what I mean). Fear is often experienced as a generalised feeling, and it is then hard to identify whether or not the feared outcome is likely to happen, and whether it would actually be all that bad anyway. Inference chaining can help clients to work out what exactly the fear is, the probability of it occurring and the impact that it would have if it did.

For example, if you had a client who felt too frightened to cold call a potential employer, you might ask them

'What is the very worst that you could imagine happening?'

They might imagine that they get through to the perfect person and then find that they freeze and find that they don't way a word. They might think that the employer will get frustrated and hang up on them. And then you could ask:

'and then what would happen?'

They might imagine that they employer would remember their name and decide not to ever employ them again

'and then what would happen?'

Your client might reflect that they would never get to work for that particular person

'and then what would happen?'

And finally, your client might wonder whether they might then look for a job in a different organisation.

You could then talk to your client about the chances of that happening, and whether working for another employer might actually be ok. By identifying the fear, very specifically, your client might be able to assess whether the feared outcome is real, likely and problematic, and to work out whether there is something they can do about it.

2) Make it an experiment
Fearing failure can be a pretty powerful barrier. As well as being unpleasant, failing can also have a detrimental impact on our confidence and self esteem, and can make us less likely to try things in the future. So it's easy to see why it's such a common barrier to action. One approach that sometimes works is to see if you could encourage your client to think of the action simply as an experiment. So rather than being a plan that might succeed or fail, they could try to see it as a research project that might go one way or another. It depersonalises it, so it's not your client who is succeeding or failing, but the hypothesis.

A client might find that they are not applying for a job that they are interested in because they are frightened of failing. You could try and work with them to get them to think of sending their CV in as an experiment. Rather than applying for a job, they are simply wondering whether their CV is the right kind of CV for a job such as that. Just curious as to whether it might be thought of as appropriate. Any lack of success is then less personal and often therefore less painful.
If they are accepted through to the next round, that's great. If they are not, they haven't failed; they have found out that their CV is not right for that kind of role at the moment.

3) What can you do to increases your chances of a good outcome?
This one really follows on from the Socratic questioning I mentioned above. Once your client has spent some time working out exactly what their anxieties are, they are then in a position to come up with some specific strategies to increase their chances of success. In the example given above, of a client who fears that their mind might go blank in an important conversation, your client might decide that they could make some notes before the conversation of the key things they want to ask, and the things they might want to say. This isn't a foolproof solution, but might help them to feel more secure and be more prepared for the phone call.

4) Boost confidence
The final idea here is to spend some time with your client boosting their confidence. Confidence helps in so many ways with job hunting and career success, and feeling good about yourself and what you have to offer can make you more likely to give things a go. One fruitful conversation with your client is about previous successes. If they are going for a job interview, you could ask them to re-live an interview in the past which went well. Ask them to remember in some detail what happened in the interview and how they felt. You could perhaps have a discussion about how they prepared for that interview, and whether there was anything particular they did which helped to make it a success.
If they are struggling to think of past successes, you could ask them to think about what they have learned from or since that event, and have a discussion around what they are going to do to make things different this time around.

Motivation

We often find that clients are struggling a bit with motivation. It's a complex issue, but I think I'm beginning to get my head around it.

There are some theories that can help us to understand motivation a bit better. First there is the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation - intrinsic motivation is where you're doing it just because you enjoy it (eg me eating cake), and extrinsic is where you do something because you know it's going to lead to something else (eg me going for a run). Intrinsic motivation is generally thought to be more powerful, and tends to lead to more sustainable action (as evidence by the amount of cake I eat vs the number of runs I go for). But there are different types of extrinsic motivation, and some are better than others. The best kind of extrinsic motivation comes when the knock on impact of the action is something that genuinely matters to the individual eg studying hard at school in order to get in to get into medical school (if that is your dream), or working hard to earn money to feed yourself and your family.

So that's a basic distinction. Then there is self-determination theory (Ryan and Deci 2000) which breaks down a little the kinds of things that get us motivated. This theory proposes that we are driven to meet three key needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness. This theory links nicely with the evidence about job satisfaction, which suggests that some of the key factors that bring job satisfaction are autonomy, the opportunity to develop your skills and good colleagues.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs (and this concept has been very much embraced by the most recent positive psychology movement) gives a very encouraging perspective which is that we all have a desire to improve ourselves, learn and develop. And this will inevitably happen, unless something gets in the way.

So, what else?

Well there is self-efficacy, which seems to have an impact on pretty much everything I ever seem to come across. This is the confidence to feel that you are going to be able to manage it. There is outcome expectations, which is related but distinct, which is the degree to which you feel that you are likely to succeed - the higher your belief of your chance of success, the more effort you are prepared to put in to achieving your goal. There is something called future orientation - which is whether you think much about the future, and instrumentality, which is the degree to which you link current behaviour with future outcomes. High degrees of both lead to higher motivation. There is your locus of control, - those with an internal locus of control feel that they have the power to influence the outcome, and those with an external locus of control feel that they have no influence on what happens. Those with an internal locus of control are much more likely to feel motivated to act. And finally there are goals, which can lead to clear identification of the steps involved and increased motivation to put plans into action.

I think I need another post to start to look at the practical tools that we can use, or suggest to our clients to take advantage of this understanding of motivation, but there is one last thing, that I find really interesting and helpful. It is that action leads to motivation. (Kearns and Gardiner 2011). Usually, we feel that we need motivation in order to act. When the motivation comes, then we will start moving. But actually, motivation usually only kicks in after you've started. The useful lessons that we can learn from that is that if there is something that you need to do, your best bet is to start it - even if you don't want to. More often than not, after about 15 minutes, it will dawn on you that you're actually finding it quite interesting. I have personally found this a really helpful strategy. When there is something that I need to do but don't really fancy, I will simply get started, promising myself that I can stop it after ten minutes if I want to. I almost never do.

Kearns, H. and Gardiner, M. (2011) Waiting for the motivation fairy Nature 472-127
http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2011/110407/pdf/nj7341-127a.pdf

Career Change: why would you?

As career coaches we spend quite a lot of our time working with people who are making or at least thinking about making a career change. I've just been reading about  Carless and Arnup's longitudinal study on what makes people change career, and what happens to them afterwards.

First it's quite interesting to note that not many studies have been conducted on what makes people change career. There is quite a lot on what makes people change jobs - the HR and Occupational Psychology brigade are particularly interested in that from an organisational perspective. Then there are several studies that look at what factors lead to the intention to change career, but curiously (perhaps?) the intention to change career is only moderately correlated to actual career change (ie most people who say that they intend to change career don't actually do so). So it's nice to read about a study that looks at people who have actually taken the plunge, and to examine what's gone on.

Encouragingly, the study suggests that people who change career are overwhelmingly pleased that they did it. They tend to report higher levels of job satisfaction and work engagement (how 'into' your work you are), more job security and shorter working hours.

The factors that lead to a job change are partly to do with the work place itself and partly to do with the individual. The study suggests that those high on extraversion and openness to experience are more likely to make a change. Extraverts tend to be more positive and optimistic, and tend to have wider networks, which all make getting a new job easier. Those open to experience tend to like change - they find the familiar boring, and are curious to try new things, so are more likely to want to change.
Demographics come into play too. Older workers are less likely to change career, as they have more invested in a particular arena and are less willing to start at the bottom again. High levels of education increase your chances of change as you tend to be more able to learn new skills and the skills you've got are more transferable.

Finally, there are a few, fairly predictable, work reasons for change. Those with low satisfaction, those being bullied and those who feel their jobs are not secure tend to be more likely to be looking around for something new.

I'm not sure that this research is particularly helpful for career coaches. The evidence that most people end up happier after a change could be a useful one to share with a client who is struggling to decide. Beyond that though I think it's just interesting. I hope you do too!