Unlocking Your Career Identity: The Power of Self-Concept
How do you see yourself? Or, what kind of person do you want to be? It’s this question that lies behind one of the great career theorists of the 20th century: Donald Super.
Super was interested in how our identity is formed throughout our working lives. How we see ourselves – our “self-concept” is a product of ourselves and our environment.
In particular, we’re shaped by our roles in society and how we interact with others. Super proposed four principal “theatres” in which we exist: The home, community, work and education. And within these, eight major roles: Child, student, leisurite, citizen, worker, spouse, homemaker and parent. We don’t necessarily always inhabit all of these throughout our life, and there may be others that you can think of. As we progress through our lives, the extent to which we inhabit different roles will vary. These roles interconnect, and together form our self-concept system.
According to Super, we’re generally most fulfilled when our work allows us to implement our self-concept: to be the person we see ourselves to be.
Super suggests that career development occurs over the course of a person's entire lifespan, from childhood to old age. At each stage of life, individuals face different developmental tasks and challenges related to their careers. For example, exploring career options in adolescence, establishing a career in early adulthood, and maintaining career satisfaction in midlife. Following Super’s ideas, you can see how choosing a career as an adolescent can be difficult: we simply don’t yet have a well-developed sense of self.
The key takeaways from Super’s theory are:
Other people are key to forming our self-concept. Each of the roles above relates to others, either explicitly (e.g. parent, citizen), or implicitly (e.g. leisurite: with the people we’re at leisure with).
We are more than our career. The different roles we play all have importance in a well-lived life. These will also influence, and be influenced by, our work.
Self-concept focusses on how we see ourselves. Our identity is not something that can be measured, rather we can see it as a project that we create for ourselves.
We’re not fixed: our self-concept will change and develop throughout our life. Therefore, changing career is normal and healthy – we don’t need to be fixed to a choice made in the past.
If you’re thinking about changing career, you can take some heart from Super’s theory. Firstly, it moves away from the “find your perfect job via a test” idea. We don’t have a set of attributes that is set in stone inside us: rather, we can decide who we want to be. That’s a shift in mindset that I think feels quite exciting. Secondly, career isn’t everything. If work isn’t 100% for you at the moment, then you can put your energy into other life roles. And thirdly, people are key to how we form our identity. As such, putting ourselves in different networks can be a good step to help us to develop our self-concept.