A couple of years ago I went on a one day “My Career” program, offered by the Investment Bank that was my employer at the time.
Their Training and Development people designed and ran a “Learning Journey” career development course, and were a very switched on bunch indeed - made me see Australians in a whole new light after doing their thing in Tokyo!
The theme of the program’s first module was all about “Understanding Me” - and I can recall starting off with a “career line” exercise. This asked us to chart the apparent ups and downs in our careers over time - in the form of a simple hand sketched graph.
We then moved on to discuss what’d made us choose these various career paths. With about 15 students in the room, there seemed to be 15 different reasons for choosing a career - and a lot of luck (good and bad).
The instructor then introduced Prof. Edgar Schein’s work around “career anchors” - and how his theory may help in choosing career and work paths that better fit our personality makeup and interests.
See this link for an overview of his work:
http://web.mit.edu/digenti/www/home.html
We then took Ed Schein’s 40 question career anchors test.
From the 8 possible anchors here were my top 3 anchors:
- Lifestyle
- Sense of Service / Dedication To a Cause
- Technical / Functional Competence
If you’ve read my About me page - would you agree that my career path to date has been in alignment with these 3?
Even though I’m a bit miffed that the “entrepreneurial / creativity” anchor didn’t make the cut, it was over 2 years ago, and I was still steeped in the “I am a valuable employee” mind set.
(Nothing wrong with that but somewhat limiting for a would-be “business owner”.)
So, here’s what I’m going to do over the weekend:
Pay my $40 and retake the test online here:
http://www.careeranchorsonline.com
(Alas, the simple link above doesn’t work as of 23-Jan-2008. When I wrote this post in December I forgot that I had to use a longer url to get to the assessment. Thanks to TK’s comment below for this updated link. https://www.careeranchorsonline.com/SCA/startPage.do )
I’ll try not to cheat(!) - can’t remember the questions anyway.
And I’ll post about it later.
– Mark McClure
One Comment
Er … your link for the test is dead.
[Hi TK,
You're right! Thanks for letting me know.
This link works when I tested it a few minutes ago:
https://www.careeranchorsonline.com/SCA/startPage.do
As I'm a customer, I will drop these folks a note about their 'missing' index page.
regards,
mark]
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[...] change" mode I was transitioning into in these, my mid-life years. Here’s a related post on career anchors I published in Dec 2007. Although "Your mileage may vary" applies when taking and [...]
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