Journey, story, role or inheritance… what does your career look like?
Career theories are developed by academics to model what careers look like. You're probably familiar with some of these already. For example, thinking about career as a path. Or a job that's a "good fit". Different theories approach career from different perspectives. There are those looking at it from a sociological, philosophical or political angle, for instance.
These different angles bring a wide range of metaphors. Each of them leads us to consider career in a different way:
Inheritance: These approaches hold that our choice of career is to some extent inevitable. It’s formed by elements we have no, or limited control over. These could include family background, social circles and genetics, geography or demography. Just think about the way in which careers often run in families.
Craft: This assumes much more agency than above, emphasising the role individuals play in creating their career. Building a career is part of building an identity.
Seasons – A season metaphor sees the work that we do as influenced by the stage of life we’re at.
Fit – this is one of the most popular ways of thinking about career: a good match between person and role. It’s this approach which has spawned the many computer-based career choice tests. One of the reasons it’s so popular is that it’s a simple, intuitive concept that promises a quick solution. However, this method does have many flaws (ask anyone if they actually did what the computer told them to do!)
Journey: The traditional career ladder metaphor - we climb our way up the hierarchy, promotion by promotion. The concept of career as a journey has also entered our day to day language. For example, “career path”, being at "career crossroads", in a "dead end job", or taking a "step forwards" in a new job.
Network: We don’t exist in isolation, and jobs involve interaction. Network theories consider the impact of others , such as family and society, on our career choices.
Theatre: How often have you talked about a job “role”? We could think about different careers having different scripts. As we build our experience, we become more familiar with, and deepen our knowledge of, a role. We could think about work experience being an opportunity to try on different roles, and an interview as an audition.
Resource: Encapsulated in the term “human resources”. Here you can think about each work experience building your store of capital that you can take to the next.
Story: Think how the same event can be interpreted quite differently by different people. These theories take the view that there’s not one objective reality, but we form our own reality. We can interpret our career history in many different ways. How we tell our story can reveal much about our current situation.
It’s not the case that any of these is the “right” model. Rather, they can be seen as different angles look from. Some of these theories are so ingrained in our culture that they have entered our language. Some will be less familiar. This does mean that there are certain cultural norms about how we view career, which may not always be helpful. For example, career as a path or ladder suggests a linearity - this might be less helpful if you're changing career. Instead, it might be more helpful to think about the bank of resources that you've built up, or what story you want to tell.
Having a range of models allows us to select the best to fit our situation. And I personally find it helpful to know that there's research that's been carried out that can provide guidance on career conundrums!