Anchor Your Career to Your Values

Let’s start with a big question:

How clear are you about the next job you’re looking for?

Perhaps your heart is set on landing that tenured academic post. Or perhaps a research-based career outside of academia excites you more. Or maybe you’ve come up with a combination of preferred occupations where you can put your skills as a research-trained scientist to good use. Or you might just not know yet…

Wherever you are in your career planning, have you taken the time to consider if these opportunities are a good fit with your personal values?

I was >15 yrs into my working life, before I properly considered what my personal working values were, or if my career choices sat well with my own professional goals and needs.

It wasn’t until I transitioned out of academia and was considering the ‘what next?’ question, did I finally evaluate the type of work that would be a good fit for me personally.

Career Anchors Represent Our Basic Values and Desires for Motivation

Between the mid-1970s and 1980s, MIT Sloan School of Management professor, Edgar Schein, defined a number of themes (that he termed career anchors) based on perceptions of talents, abilities, basic beliefs, motivations and needs, relating to careers.

Schein proposed that strong non-monetary factors affect work and career satisfaction, and devised the anchors to help understand these motivations for career decisions. This has two implications for job seekers:

1. If these anchors are not met, individuals could end up in roles where they lack job satisfaction

2. Because they represent motivations to pick certain jobs, the anchors can serve as a robust basis for career decisions 

Depending on work and life-experiences, Schein proposed eight anchors as a basis for career decisions: 

Autonomy/Independence (AU): Seeking the opportunity to work under your own rules and steam. Defining your own way of working and a preference towards opting for self-employment or jobs with high autonomy (professor, field sales, consultants etc.) 

Entrepreneurial Creativity (EC): Seeking the opportunity to invent things, be creative and run your organisation/enterprise that’s built on your own abilities. You can get easily bored. Unlike AU workers (who enjoy working independently), you prefer to share workload above seeking autonomy, however work ownership is important. 

General Managerial Competence (GM): Seeking the opportunity to be managers, problem-solve and deal with others. This requires emotional competence. Through integrating the efforts of others, you thrive on the responsibility of their outputs for an organisation.

Lifestyle (LS): Seeking the opportunity to integrate work with your whole pattern of living. Thriving in a career situation that provides ample flexibility integrate personal and family needs, success is defined more broadly than just career alone.

Pure Challenge (CH): Seeking the opportunity to work on seemingly impossible problems and generate solutions. Jobs will be changed when the current one gets boring and a solution is reached, creating a varied career path.

Security/Stability (SE): Seeking the opportunity to achieve stability and tenure in your job. Security is a primary factor in your life and therefore you avoid risks, and tend prefer to stay a long time in your job (where possible). The focus is less about the content or rank you achieve and more about the financial and employment stability.

Service/Dedication to a Cause (SV): Seeking the opportunity to help achieve something of value. Your over aching aim is to make the world a better place (curing diseases, improving well-being, solving environmental problems etc.).

Technical/Functional Competence (TF): Seeking the opportunity to become really good at a technical skill set and to work at it to become an expert. You are stimulated by challenges that require your skill set to solve. Thriving in positions that allow you to continually develop your skills to a higher level, you aim to do your work to a higher standard than others.

Career Values Questionnaire

Below I provide a questionnaire to help you determine your career anchors (based on Schein’s model):

1. Work through the questionnaire below using the following scale to indicate how well each statement fits your personal values (will take around 10-15 mins):

• • Never true for me: 1
  • Seldom true for me: 2
  • Often true for me: 3
  • Always true for me: 4

2. Score the test using the grid provided.

Questionnaire 

1. I want to be so good at what I do that others will seek my expert advice.

2. I am most fulfilled in my work when I have been able to integrate the efforts of others towards a common task.

3. I dream of having a career that will allow me the freedom to do a job my way and on my own schedule.

4. I am always on the lookout for ideas that would permit me to start my own enterprise.

5. Security and stability are more important to me than freedom and autonomy.

6. I would rather leave my organisation than be put into a job that would compromise my ability to pursue personal and family concerns.

7. I will feel successful in my career only if I have a feeling of having made a real contribution to the welfare of society.

8. I dream of a career in which I will always be challenged by ever more difficult problems.

9. I will feel successful in my career only if I can develop my technical or functional skills to a very high level of competence.

10. I dream of being in charge of a complex organisation and making decisions that affect many people.

11. I am most fulfilled in my work when I am completely free to define my own tasks, schedules, and procedures.

12. I would rather leave my organisation altogether than accept an assignment that would jeopardise my job security in that organisation.

13. Building my own business is more important to me than achieving a high-level managerial position in someone else’s organisation.

14. I am most fulfilled in my career when I have been able to use my talents in the service of others.

15. I will feel successful in my career only if I face and overcome very difficult challenges.

16. I dream of a career that will permit me to integrate my personal, family, and work needs.

17. Becoming a senior functional manager in my area of expertise is more attractive to me than becoming a general manager.

18. I will feel successful in my career only if I achieve the autonomy and freedom to define my work.

19. I usually seek jobs in organisations that will give me a sense of stability and security.

20. I am most fulfilled in my career when I have been able to build something that is entirely the result of my own ideas and efforts.

21. I will feel successful only if I become a high-level general manager in an organisation.

22. Using my skills to make the world a better place to live and work is what drives my career decisions.

23. I have been most fulfilled in my career when I have solved seemingly unsolvable problems or won out over seemingly impossible odds.

24. I feel successful in life only if I have been able to balance my personal, family and career requirements.

25. I dream of a career that will allow me to feel a sense of stability and security.

26. I would rather leave my organisation than to accept a rotational assignment that would take me out of my area of expertise.

27. Balancing the demands of my personal and professional life is more important to me than a high-level managerial position.

28. I dream of being in a career that makes a real contribution to humanity and society.

29. I will feel successful in my career only if I have succeeded in creating or building something that is entirely my own product or idea.

30. Becoming a general manager is more attractive to me than becoming a senior functional manager in my area of expertise.

31. The chance to do a job in my own way, free of rules and constraints, is important to me.

32. I prefer work opportunities that strongly challenge my problem solving and competitive skills.

33. I dream of starting up and building my own business.

34. I would rather leave my organisation than accept a job that would take me away from my ability to be of service to others.

35. I am most fulfilled in my work when I have been able to use my special skills and talents.

36. I would rather leave my organisation than accept a job that would take me away from the path of general management.

37. I am most fulfilled in my work life when I feel that I have complete financial and employment security.

38. I would rather leave my organisation than accept a job that would reduce my autonomy and freedom.

39. I have always sought out work opportunities that would minimise interference with personal or family concerns.

40. Working on problems that are almost unsolvable is more important to me than achieving a high-level managerial position.

Scoring the Questionnaire

Looking over your answers, pick your top five choices that most clearly describe how you feel. Give each of these five choices an additional 5 points.

Use the scoring grid below to create a total for each of the eight anchors. Each number in the grid represents each of the questions (1-40). Total your score for the five questions that represent each anchor.

For example to score your tendency towards TF, total your scores to questions 1, 9, 17, 26, and 35. Repeat this for each of the remaining seven anchors.

Scoring Grid 

Interpreting your Results

Once you’ve scored the test, look at the top three scores as these represent the strongest anchors you have towards your work. Read the description of these anchors above.

Knowledge of your anchors helps in career decisions. For example, if you’ve scored highly in SE, you’ll likely feel more comfortable with employment that provides security and stability over jobs that are more risky (temporary contracts or self-employment).

Ultimately these anchors help you diagnose your values and expectations from the work roles you are contemplating undertaking.

It’s tempting to consider what career choices suit what anchors, but this is a little too simplistic.

For example, if you’ve scored highly in AU you might think a medical science liaison role would be a great fit for you as you’re able to be autonomous in your day-to-day field work. Likewise, if SV has come out as your top anchor, you might think you’ll thrive in a public sector service role.

However, whilst you may gain an indication that the general day-to-day work could be a good fit for you, positions with very similar job descriptions can vary greatly.

Individual careers differ hugely between people who essential have the same occupation on paper.

Whilst the job descriptions might be identical, differences based on organisation, management, and team set up, strongly affect people’s ability to work in the way that best suits their own values.

Therefore, the anchors are best used to identify career options that might work for you and then assess positions that best support your values.

Understanding the career anchors that motivate you in the workplace, will allow you to determine if a particular job will enable you to excel, which is something you should be exploring with potential employers at the interview stage… 

In Summary 

• Aligning career choices with your personal values helps achieve job satisfaction 

• Schein’s ‘career anchors’ tool enables you to align your personal motivations to that of your work 

• Using the questionnaire above, establish your top career anchors 

• Knowledge of your anchors will help you determine if a role within a particular organisation is a good fit with your personal values

So what did your values come out as – was it expected or something of a surprise? Leave a comment below.

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