Wednesday 7 December 2011

Becoming your own Career Coach

Since finishing the cpd23 programme I’ve been on the lookout for other training opportunities,  so I was pleased when the chance came up to attend this workshop. The purpose of the workshop was to provide frameworks and models to enable participants to take control of their future career choices. Our trainer, Sue O’Boyle began by talking to us about changing organisations and the impact this can have on career paths. We discussed how there are external triggers such as technology,  customers, the economy and competition which can affect us, as well as organisational ones such as leadership changes and reorganisation.

Next we explored psychological contracts; individual expectations of work and careers. The exercise asked us to consider what our expectations were about our job, role and employer when we first began working for the university, and how true those expectations were today. I’ve worked in the Robinson Library for over 10 years, so I found it difficult to recall what my original expectations were. However, I think at the time I was hoping I’d have the opportunity to gain new skills and knowledge that I wasn’t able to in my previous job. This is still one of the things I value today and I’ve had the opportunity to do this a lot more since I began my secondment. This exercise helped us to reflect on want we originally wanted from our job and perhaps how the things we value about out work might have changed.

The workshop continued with a self-assessment questionnaire (Schein, 2006) which was designed to help us consider our career choices. We were given a list of 40 statements and asked to rate them according to how true we felt them to be. We then had to add up the scores to find our ‘Career Anchor’, a combination of perceived areas of competence, motives and values that we would not give up if faced with a career decision that might not allow us to fulfil it.  My career anchor was Technical/Functional Competence; apparently I derive my sense of identity from the exercise of my skills and am most happy when work permits me to be challenged in those areas.  Anyone in this category is not interested in management. I have to say I think this summed me up pretty well!

We then had the option to do a couple of different exercises: one was to imagine our 6 dream jobs and what attracted us to them. Alternatively we were asked to imagine our retirement party. As that is a long way off for me, I chose the former exercise. Interestingly none of my dream jobs had anything to do with library work; I’m not sure what that means!

We were then asked to consider our career as a journey; we had to imagine our current position as a roundabout with different options or routes available. This helped us reflect on possible opportunities and how we would rate them in terms of attraction or difficulty. It was interesting to discuss this with other staff and see how similar or different our situations were. It also helped some people to look at options they perhaps hadn’t considered before or realise that there were options open to them that they hadn’t thought about. For me the exercise reinforced my feeling that my current position is something I enjoy and would like to continue, although I realise this might not be possible.

Finally we were asked to look at our future: where we were going and what we wanted to achieve in our career. I think the most important thing I learned from the workshop was the need to reflect on our options and to be responsible for our own career choices. I think I have already started going in the right direction and the workshop reinforced this and helped me to focus more.

As this was only a half day course we weren’t able to cover everything, but it was a good starting point and Sue left us with other exercises to explore and a lot to think about

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