Tag Archives: Edgar Schein

Career Anchors Workbook

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Last December I wrote about taking Prof Edgar Schein’s Career Anchors online assessment test that also comes with a downloadable 72 page participant workbook.

career anchors

(The test is administered and published by Pfeiffer, a division of John Wiley & Sons inc. The test link is here).
Here are 8 comments I want to make after going through the workbook.

1- Use the Participant Workbook (a 480KByte Acrobat PDF file) in conjunction with your test report.

2- A sample career anchors test report is here .

3-The first 25 pages of the workbook describe the 8 career anchors in more detail and focus on the preferred type of work, pay and benefits, growth opportunities and recognition as suggested by the research results.

This is well worth a couple of readings as the subtleties of what anchors you to any given career or path may have escaped your attention.

Also, the case is presented for the internal nature of career anchors in contrast to the processes and stages we often perceive as the external nature of a given career. (The workbook highlights 8 generic career stages believed to be applicable to a large number of organizations and occupations.)

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Career Anchors – Do You Know What Yours Are?

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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 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 (Oct 2011 Update; that link appears dead. Please use this one:
http://executive.mit.edu/faculty/profile/29-edgar-schein 

We then took Ed Schein’s 40 question career anchors test.

From the 8 possible anchors here were my top 3 anchors:

  1. Lifestyle
  2. Sense of Service / Dedication To a Cause
  3. 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

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