Discovering What Drives Your Career: The Power of Career Anchors
What drives you in your career? Which aspects of your work would you not be prepared to give up?
One tool that you can use to consider what’s important to you in your work is Career Anchors. These are a simple way of describing how you see your abilities, motives and values. You’ll most enjoy your job when it’s aligned with these anchors. Being clear on your anchors is a way of navigating the countless choices which exist.
The technique was developed by Edgar Schein, a US professor of organisational development. There are eight career anchors, defined as:
Autonomy/independence: You value flexibility and the freedom to make your own choices.
Security/stability: Whilst some degree of stability is important for everyone, for those with this anchor the drive is particularly strong. Your priority is a secure, stable and predictable work environment.
Technical-functional competence: You value being an expert in a particular skill or field. Whilst you may go into management if it allows you to focus on your expertise, you will avoid general management.
General Managerial Competence: You're motivated by the desire to lead and manage others. You like running a team, and bringing out the best in others.
Entrepreneurial Creativity: Your main drive is to create something new, whether through entrepreneurship or innovative projects. You are keen to be able to see the results of your work, and have something you can call your own.
Pure Challenge: A desire for constant learning, problem-solving, and facing challenging tasks. You seek novelty, and will become bored if the work becomes too easy.
Lifestyle: You see career as just one part of your life. You make career choices holistically, prioritising factors like work-life balance, location or schedule over specific job characteristics.
Service and dedication to a cause: You take a values-driven approach to your career, wanting to make the world a better place. Meaning and purpose are important aspects of your work.
Take some time to reflect on the anchors above - which ones do you identify with? Most people will identify with two or three (there are many online quizzes which can help you as well). You can think of these almost as your red lines: these are things that you would not sacrifice (or the absence of which in your current work place is likely to be making you miserable). Another way to consider them is to score each one from 1 to 10.
The main benefits of Schein’s career anchors come from self-reflection. Why does those particular anchors matter to you? Does your current role or career path meet the needs of your particular anchors? If not, what could you do to accommodate this? Do you need a wholesale change in organisation?
If you are looking to move on, knowing your anchors allows you to filter options and ask useful questions of future employers. For example, if you know autonomy is important to you, to what extent will you have control over your workload and projects? If dedication to a cause is one of your anchors, how do the values of the organisation align with yours?
Try the exercise and see how you get on: reflecting on your career anchors can be a powerful tool for finding work that’s a good fit for you.