Brief Summary
The speaker discusses how personal identities significantly influence professional identities and career decisions. She critiques traditional career counseling approaches, including the "follow your passion" mantra and the design thinking framework, arguing that they often overlook the irrationality and biases that shape our choices. She introduces the idea that career identity is the sum of various personal identities, forming a deeply personal narrative or "script" that guides our decisions. She emphasizes the importance of self-awareness in understanding and questioning this script to make more authentic career choices, especially in the face of cultural biases and the uncertainties of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
- Personal identities greatly influence professional identities and career decisions.
- Traditional career counseling approaches, like "follow your passion," are flawed.
- Self-awareness is crucial to understanding and questioning the "script" that guides career decisions.
The speaker begins by sharing a personal experience of a knee injury that forced her to give up running, an identity deeply ingrained in her sense of self. This loss was more painful than the physical injury itself. She identifies herself through various identities: woman, mother, American, and a Rhode Island native, and a number of professional identities, such as tour guide, camp counselor, schoolteacher, graduate student, podcast host and career counselor. This experience leads her to reflect on how personal identities affect and create professional identities, which she has observed through her career counseling practice.
The speaker addresses the issue of employee disengagement, noting that 87% of employees worldwide are not engaged in their work, according to Gallup. While organizations and consultants often focus on external factors like office culture and wages, she, as a career counselor, is more interested in the internal reasons behind career choices. She explains that historically, career choices were limited by factors like family tradition, gender, and social class. However, the Industrial Revolutions broadened the world of work, leading to the emergence of career counseling.
The speaker traces the history of career counseling, starting with the vocational Bureau in Boston in 1908, which helped individuals navigate the expanding world of work by assessing their backgrounds, skills, and interests. The military also took an interest, using psychological tests to place individuals in jobs during World War I and World War II. By the late 1990s, during the digital age, a new paradigm emerged that emphasized following one's passions.
The speaker critiques the "follow your passion" approach to career counseling, recounting a story of a counselor who helped a client find a job working with gorillas. She notes that this approach didn't resonate with her MBA students, who were more concerned with paying off debt and finding stable employment. She points out that in recent years, there has been pushback against the idea of passion dictating career decisions, partly because many people don't know what their passions are and partly due to fears about job displacement from the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The speaker discusses design thinking as another framework for career decision-making, which involves understanding clients, brainstorming ideas, and testing solutions. Proponents of this approach suggest that individuals will need to iterate through many different roles. However, she argues that most people lack the self-awareness to effectively navigate this process, often failing to understand themselves before making career decisions.
Drawing from behavioral economics and psychology, the speaker asserts that career decisions are often irrational and based on unconscious biases influenced by social surroundings, including parents, peers, and communities. She illustrates this with the story of a law student who chose law school because she didn't want to go to medical school, highlighting how cultural messages and personal identities like gender, race, religion, and socioeconomic status can lead individuals to embrace or foreclose on career options, especially if they anticipate barriers to success.
The speaker emphasizes the importance of self-awareness in overcoming internalized biases and avoiding false assumptions when hiring. She presents career identity as the sum of all possible identities, influencing individuals in different ways at different times. She prefers to view these identities as forming a deeply personal narrative or "script" that guides decisions, rather than a simple equation.
The speaker concludes by arguing that career decisions cannot be programmed by computers because they are deeply personal. She urges individuals to understand and question their scripts, embracing the messiness of the iterative writing process. She encourages listeners to own their stories and not let others write them for them, quoting Cicero to underscore the timeless difficulty of this challenge.
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Transcript
Full transcript of “The Psychology of Career Decisions | Sharon Belden Castonguay | TEDxWesleyanU”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 [Music] recently I was forced to assume an alternate identity started with this cane I suffered a knee injury and while I will soon have surgery and be able to walk normally again my orthopedist assures me that my running days are over now for those of you who only run when chased you may be thinking what a stroke of luck a doctor sanctioned excuse not to work out but since taking up running after college it's become more than just a pastime for me but part of who I am Runner has become one of my identities and giving up that identity has turned
0:47 out to be more painful than the injury itself now like everybody I have a lot of identities I am a woman a mother an American a proud native of Rhode Island I've had a number of professional identities in my life tour guide can't counselor schoolteacher graduate student in developmental psychology podcast host career counselor and it is through my career counseling practice that I've come to recognize how personal identities can affect and create professional identities I'm going to talk a little bit more about how and why this is so but first I'd like to address
1:32 why it's important according to Gallup eighty-seven percent of employees worldwide are not engaged in their work there are a lot of people who study this phenomenon largely because it has a pretty substantial effect on the bottom line now the organizations and consultants that study this tend to look at the external factors for why people are not engaged things like office culture or wages as a career counselor I'm more interested in internal reasons like why someone shows a particular line of work in the first place and my field of career development has looked somewhat differently over time of course throughout much of human history people
2:17 didn't actually choose a line of work you basically did whatever your parents did and what you did for a living was prescribed by where you were from your gender and your social class but during the first and second industrial revolutions as people started moving from the farms into the cities the world of work broadened and the very first career counseling open office opened in 1908 the vocational Bureau was located in Boston's North End neighborhood and served the local community free of charge to help them navigate this new world of work they interviewed them extensively about their backgrounds skills and interest and provided background about local employers now
3:03 obviously this wasn't a particularly widespread phenomenon but the military started to take an interest in their work they needed to figure out a way of putting workers placed into jobs to help serve the war efforts during World War one in World War two and by the Second World War they had a lot of psychologists that they had hired to develop tests specifically for this purpose some of these tests are actually still used today in various forms and it's possible that some of you have taken them maybe through a high school guidance counselor through an employer now by the time I started in the fields of career counseling in the late 90s we were in the midst of the third Industrial Revolution the digital age and the testing industry was still alive
3:50 and well but by then a new paradigm had emerged that held that what we really needed to would be concerned about was our clients passions do what you're passionate about and you'll never work a day in your life right I remember early on attending a professional development session with a woman who was considered one of the biggest names in my field a very successful author she told the story of a client with whom she had worked who was really difficult simply because she didn't have any clearly articulated passion finally one day in desperation the counselor said to her give me a sense of something you're interested in anything at all the woman kind of shrugged somewhat sheepishly and said well I've
4:37 always been kind of interested in gorillas triumphant the counsellor announced that she had gone on to work for a local zoo and voila problem solved passion wins now at the time I was working with business students who generally speaking we're not interested in gorillas in fact I found that the dirty little secret of most MBAs was that they had gone back to school because they didn't like their first jobs out of college and they were looking for a socially acceptable way of hitting the restart button if I suggested to them that they should find their passion they would respond that they were tens of thousands of dollars in debt and that while they were interested in finding a good
5:22 professional fit they were primarily interested in generating a paycheck now over the last ten or fifteen years there's actually been quite a bit of pushback around the idea of passion dictating career decisions and there's a couple of reasons for why this is one is that most people have no earthly idea what their passions are but another reason for this pushback comes from fear of the fourth Industrial Revolution what difference does it make if we're passionate about something if artificial intelligence is going to take away all the jobs even those who embrace our robot overlords will admit that no one really knows what the jobs are gonna be twenty ten even five years down the road so how do we help people navigate career
6:11 decisions in this new world order one potential framework that has emerged from this conversation comes actually from the field of design the design thinking process holds the designers work with clients to really get to know them well understand their problems help define them they work with them to brainstorm possible ideas and prototypes and then test out possible solutions those who are proponents of applying Design Thinking to career decision-making holds that people who are working today will need to go through a lot of different iterations for the jobs that they do they might have to try on many different
6:57 cells and avoid prematurely foreclosing on any one area the problem with that is that most people don't have the self-awareness to do that well most people don't take the time to figure out who they are before making a decision about what they want to be now if there's one thing that we have learned from the fields of behavioral economics and psychology in recent years is that we as humans are not nearly as rational as we thought we were for example we are predisposed to make bad financial decisions like spending too much money today and not saving
7:42 enough for our future selves to enjoy retirement I suggest that we are just as irrational about making career decisions let me give you an example a number of years ago I was working with a law student she came into my office very upset she had just received her grades for the year and realized that she had done so poorly that she was going to be locked out of the jobs that would pay her the kind of salary that was going to be necessary to pay back her considerable loss school loans as she sat there sobbing in my office she admitted that she simply did not like the study of law so I said to her well what made you decide to go to law school because I didn't want to go to medical
8:30 school it is a gentlemen of the jury I submit to you that most people do not make career decisions rationally but rather based on deeply-held often unconscious biases that they received from their social surround they're highly influenced by their parents their peers their local communities and they internalize a lot of these biases that they see around them and they tend to then follow others into things that they have done as well they also tend to internalize messages that they are receiving from their local and national cultures particularly around personal
9:16 identities like gender race religion or socioeconomic status and will tend to either embrace or foreclose on options accordingly particularly if they anticipate barriers for success and let's acknowledge that a lot of people do face barriers to success particularly along the lines of gender race religion socioeconomic status sexual orientation but this is exactly why I think self-awareness is so important because not only can it help us not internalize these biases that are coming from culture but also help keep us from making false assumptions about others when it comes time for us to do the hiring
10:01 what is tricky is that each of us as individuals will internalize and make decisions upon a lot of these unconscious as well as conscious personal identities at different times throughout our lives and this is going to be constantly in flux for those of you who are more quantitatively oriented allow me to present this as an equation with career identity being the sum of every possible identity you could have all influencing you in different ways in different periods of time a lot of it unconscious but I will admit this is not my favorite analogy I tend to think of all of those
10:49 individual variables all of those identities coming together is not an equation but as a script a deeply personal life and career narrative that tells the story of who we are and guides our decisions this is why in the fourth Industrial Revolution we cannot program computers to make career decisions for us a script is deeply personal but we also must learn not to just follow it to the letter we must learn to understand it and question it your script is iterative and like any writing process it's likely to be messy I urge you to
11:35 embrace that messiness own your story and don't let others write it for you and know that this process has always been messy if one of my identities is former runner another of my identities is liberal arts college graduate and as such I cannot end a presentation without including a quote from a dead white guy so I offer you this from Cicero to underscore that throughout time this is the most difficult problem in the world thank you very much you
