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

Meaningful work: what it is and how can we help our clients to identify it?

Meaningful work is something which has been written about a fair amount in the literature but it's always been a bit piecemeal. It's a topic of interest to organisational and business psychologists, positive psychologists and of course career development theorists, but these academic arenas haven't really paid much attention to each other, resulting in an evidence base which is patchy and confusing.
This paper "Purpose and meaning in career development applications" starts to plug the gap, providing a good summary of the relevant literature and giving some examples of practical exercises that career practitioners can use with their clients.
The authors identify six different areas that are deemed worthy of our consideration: strengths, positive emotions and flow, gratitude, work hope, job crafting and calling.
Overall the evidence between career well-being and life well-being is strong and the research indicates that people, these days, are looking for work which matters in a deeper and more existential way, developing their potential and making a contribution to the common good.
But what do we know about what factors lead to a more meaningful career, and how can we as practitioners help our clients to achieve this?

1. Strengths.
According to strengths theory our strengths carry intrinsic meaning, so simply using our strengths brings meaning to our lives. Evidence shows that using our strengths on a daily basis increases the levels of meaning in our lives and using them at work increases meaning at work and job satisfaction. Two classifications of strengths are recommended for our work with clients: the Values in Action strengths finder and Clifton's Strengths finder. These can be great tools to help your clients identify their strengths and this can lead to valuable discussions.

2. Positive emotions and flow
When people feel better at work they are more fulfilled and they work more effectively. Positive emotions have been shown to link with creative problem solving, helping behaviours and job satisfaction. We can help our clients to experience more positive emotions at work by getting them to think of ways in which they can seek out or create situations which are likely to make them feel good. One way to do this is to try and get them to think about the situations in which they experience 'flow'.
Flow is that feeling you get when you are so absorbed in a task that you're not aware of time passing and don't notice anything going on around you. It can enhance mood, boost self-esteem and give you a sense of purpose. Flow tends to happen when people are engaged with something they are good at but find hard. If we can get clients to identify times when they experience flow at work, we could then work with them to think about how they could get themselves in to those situations more frequently.

3. Gratitude
Being thankful and giving thanks for what you've got has been linked to greater well-being. It has been shown to stir up positive emotions, allows us to focus on our blessings, and creates an expectation and a confidence that good things will come to us. There is a little bit of evidence too that these positive outcomes apply to work-related gratitude. The authors therefore suggest that we should encourage our clients to count their work blessings and maybe even engage in thanking some of their colleagues for what they have brought to their working lives.

4. Work hope
Hope in an academic context means something much more specific than its definition in everyday conversation. In psychological terms it has three elements: a goal, a pathway to a goal and agency. So it's knowing where you want to get to, knowing how to get there, and believing that you can do it. Having hope is linked to increased self-esteem, making self-directed career decisions and is so closely associated with having meaningful work that some academics claim that it is in fact a core element of meaningful work, rather than a separate construct. Working with clients on identifying goals and breaking these down in to numerous sub-goals has been shown to help foster hope.

5. Job crafting
This is one which has been around for a while in career development theories but is new to positive psychology. It makes explicit the idea that we have some control over our jobs and can shape them to better meet our needs. Workers can engage in task, relational and cognitive crafting. This process results in individuals changing their daily work to involve more tasks which better suit them, spending time with people they work well with, and thinking about their work more positively. It has been shown to link with performance, satisfaction and commitment, so everyone is a winner!

6. Calling
Again, not a new one for many career practitioners. As sense of calling is when someone feels destined to fulfil a particular role which fits with their broader life purpose and has a connection with something pro-social. Links have been found in the research between having a calling and life wellbeing, job satisfaction and meaning at work. Conversations with clients which encourage them to think about the three key elements (what they were born to do, what do think matters in life, and what could they contribute to the greater good) can spark off ideas in clients who may not have identified their calling.

Dik, B.J., Duffy, R.D., Allan, B.A., O’Donnell, M.B., Shim, Y. and Steger, M.F. (2015) Purpose and meaning in career development applications The Counseling Psychologists, 43(4) 558 – 585

Psychology-of-working perspective: A theory for the less privileged

A challenge that is often levelled at career decision making theories is that the whole notion of making a choice about what path to follow is a fanciful luxury for huge swathes of the population.


I love a career theory, but I never have a great answer for this - I try argue that most people have at least some kind of choice at some level, and also that even if choices are limited for many, we still need career decision making theories to help support the choices of others. But to be honest, It's a weak argument.

But here is a nice theory which specifically addresses the issue: the psychology-of-working perspective (Blustein, 2006). It's ten years old, but I've only recently come across it, and I think it's got something to offer.

The psychology-of-working perspective (Blustein, 2006) was developed to sit alongside traditional career decision making theories, and is aimed at helping us to understand the experiences of those for whom work is a basic form of survival rather than an expression of self-actualisation.


The authors of this theory highlight some particular groups of individuals who are likely to have limited choice over their career trajectories. These include those on welfare who are required to take any job which comes their way, those with learning disabilities, those who lack the economic or social resources to get the training they need to get the jobs they desire and those who are discriminated against on the grounds of gender, race, ethnicity or social class. They argue (rightly so) that people in these groups are less likely to have a wide range of options open to them, so the more mainstream career theories which encourage individuals to design their own lives, actualise their self-concepts or live out their values in their work, simply don't apply.

So this theory tries to be a bit broader and works at different levels. According to the psychology-of-working perspective, work fulfils three functions: survival and power; relatedness; and self-determination.

At the bottom of the pyramid, work provides us with a means to survive, and some source of power over our own lives, though access to material resources (ie money) and social resources (ie status). The second facet is relatedness - work allows us to develop meaningful relationships. Good relationships with colleagues have been shown to increase job satisfaction and improve well-being in all areas of our lives. The third element is the notion of self-determination (Ryan and Deci, 2000) which says that intrinsic motivation is always going to lead to more fulfilling work than extrinsic: if you can find a job your enjoy for its own sake, you're going to be happier than if you are just working to earn money to pay the bills. Blustein acknowledges that many of us are in jobs which aren't necessarily all that intrinsically interesting, but suggests that one thing that career practitioners could usefully do, is to work with clients to see if they can identify ways to make their jobs more fulfilling.



The theory suggests, much like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that you need to have the lower needs met before you can start to think about the higher level needs: you're not going to start thinking about whether or not you have lovely colleagues until you are sure you're earning enough money to survive. In this way, the approach provides a single framework which explains the motivation of those who have limited work choices as well as those who have control over their career paths.


Alongside this explanatory framework, Blustein gives four recommendations for practice, suggesting that career practitioners should:


1) Foster empowerment
2) Foster critical consciousness
3) Promote skill building
4) Provide support for work volition


The first three aren't particularly innovative - career practitioners are well versed in encouraging clients to take ownership of their own career paths, ensuring their decisions are grounded in reality and ensuring that they are aware of their strengths and how they can build on them. The fourth though, this idea of supporting 'work volition' feels a bit different. The focus here is on getting clients to address the barriers which might be keeping them stuck at the 'survival and power' level, and maybe seeing if they could overcome, or even reframe the barriers.


I quite like this theory. It's perhaps not rocket science, but it does make sense to me, and I think that a theory which actually reflects the real lives of our clients is useful.





Why aren't there more learning theories in careers?

I've probably talked about this before, (probably on more than one occasion) but I'm thinking again about the role that learning theories should play in career education, and wondering if that's a bit different from the one they actually play.

I trained as a careers adviser nearly 20 years ago, and these days I'm not really sure what kinds of learning theories get covered in other career practitioner courses. But as someone relatively new to teaching, I have spent quite a lot of time finding out about how people learn, and it's been a revelation to me. My knowledge is a bit home-made, and I'm sure it's not comprehensive, but I can see that even what I know would be really useful for any career practitioner who works with groups of clients.

So, here are my top three favourite learning theories (and a bit of empirical evidence) and what I do differently now that I know about them.

1. The pyramid of learning:

 

The detail of the study which led to this has been a bit discredited, but the underpinning concepts seem to stand up to scrutiny. The basic premise is that you are likely to remember very little of what you hear in a lecture, a bit more of what you talk about and almost everything that you have had to actually teach.

Students I find can be a bit resistant to this, but when I am trying to get people to get their heads round something really complex, I ask them to prepare a short chunk of a lesson and teach each other. It's complicated logistically, but works really well.

2. Andragogy
This is a fairly old one (Knowles 1958) which is supposed to show how adults learn in a different way from children. I remain unconvinced about the difference between the two groups of learners, but I like what the theory suggests. Knowles suggests that the key to good learning is to link the topic being studied to the participants' lives. First of all the approach holds that to motivate students to learn, they have to understand why they are learning this and what it's going to do for them. Then it's important that the students make links between the new information they are learning and what they already know. Finally a teacher should spend time at the end making sure the students are really, explicitly clear about how exactly they can incorporate their new learning into their practice.

This isn't rocket science, is it, but for me having this explicitly in my mind when I plan sessions is useful.

3. The link between thought and language.
This is probably my very favourite. It comes from Vygotsky, who seems to have come up with a wide arrange of innovative theories. Vygotsky suggests that thought and language are really closely bound up together. He says that thoughts aren't created as fully formed, properly worked though concepts. They start as fuzzy notions, and it is only when they are put into words that the thoughts become concrete. This suggests that in a learning context, each participant needs to be given the opportunity to put their own ideas into words in order to make their ideas more tangible. The words could be written or spoken, and done in pairs, groups or class discussion.

4. Learning styles
This isn't a favourite theory, but it's a favourite bit of empirical evidence. Learning styles have really cornered the market when it comes to learning theories and there are at least 71 different learning style frameworks (Honey and Mumford are the most well known). They are intuitively appealing, and it's always nice to be able to identify what kind of learner you are. But the evidence supporting their value as a way to enhance learning is really weak. It seems to be fairly well documented that people do indeed have preferences - there are definitely people who like looking at pictures more than words, or who prefer thinking about abstract concepts over the application of ideas. But the evidence is pretty consistent that this has very little (or no) impact on how well people actually learn. Visual learners don't absorb more information when it's presented in picture form than in words, and reflectors don't excel when given more space to reflect.

There are a few more. I also like Active Learning (I did a blog post on that last year, I think) and I'm really keen on student-centred learning. And there are probably dozens (maybe hundreds) of other theories out there.

I think my teaching is genuinely better since I've started to understand some of these, and I wonder if careers education broadly might benefit from a stronger underpinning of learning theories?

 

Career Sagacity

I've been involved with quite a few discussions recently about our profession and what makes it unique. We do seem to struggle to define or articulate what exactly distinguishes us from other helping professions. Colleagues have variously suggested that it's knowledge about the world of work, self-reflective practice, or an impartial, client-centred philosophy, but I struggle with all of these. The first one (knowledge of the world of work) because I really don't want the heart of my professionalism to reside in something which I could never properly keep on top of and which Google does so much better than me, and the second two (reflective practice and an impartial client-centred philosophy) because they don't mark us out as any different from counsellors, therapists or social workers.

But I was reading something about the notion of wisdom, and it really struck a chord. I think this is the closest thing I've come to which reflects what I'm aiming for in my professional practice. This stuff isn't new, but I'm not sure I've seen it applied to our role before.

Berlin's wisdom paradigm (Baltes and Freund, 2003) sets out five criteria which make up wisdom. I describe them below as they might apply to career practice:

1.  Rich factual knowledge. As career practitioners we should have a superior knowledge base about the world of work. I'm not at all suggesting this needs to be perfect, but I think it's genuinely helpful for us to have a good overview, and some professional knowledge which is hard for our clients to access.

2. Rich knowledge of how to deal with these pragmatics. So this is where career theories come in. We should know how people make career decisions, how people make good career decisions, where people get stuck, and how clients can change their responses or behaviour to make getting jobs more likely. Here too sits our practice - this section encompasses information about how to work with clients to support them to make the most fulfilling choices and achieve their goals.

3. Knowledge about the themes and contexts of life. This puts careers within a system, and ensures that practitioners understand the different drivers and different factors which are woven into each career decision.

4. Recognition and tolerance of differences in beliefs. Here's where the self-reflective, client-centred and non-judgemental philosophy fits in.

5. Recognition and tolerance of uncertainly and ambiguity. This feels like an  excellent approach to dealing both with people and the world of work. It ensures that we focus on equipping our clients with the resources they need to negotiate their changing lives and the changing work place, and that we too can cope with the shifting landscapes that we face. It touches on career resilience and adaptability,

Key to this framework is the idea that wisdom doesn't depend on superior cognitive or technical knowledge: we are not competing with Google to know everything there is to know about careers in the 21st century, but it's a combination of knowledge and an understanding of how that knowledge is applied. It's not quite as client-centred as the coaching approach that I normally advocate, but I think it's interesting.

I've thought about this framework in terms of my own practice - my aspirations to be a Career Sage, but an alternative framing could allow us to see this as a taxonomy of the elements we are trying to engender in our clients. Perhaps it's more appropriate to work towards our clients becoming Career Sages.

Either way, I thought this was rather interesting and good food for thought.

Baltes, P.B. (1987) Theoretical propositions o fife-span developmental psychology: on the dynamics between growth and decline. Developmental Psychology 23 611 - 626

Balters, P.B., Staudinger, U.M, Maercker, A. and Smith J. (1985) People nominated as wise: a comparative study of wisdom-related knowledge, Psychology and Aging 10, 155- 166