'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?‘
'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the
Cheshire Cat.
'I don't much care where,' said Alice.
'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.
'So long as I get somewhere,' Alice added as an explanation.
'Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, 'if you only walk long
enough.'
Lewis Carroll
Career Management Skills
11.12.2013
Jaana O. Liimatainen, PhD
Extension School
Themes
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•
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Me as a ”career researcher”
How to become aware of my strenghts and skills?
Planned happenstance
Acknowledgement
VALOA-project (Milja Tuomaala and Tiina Hämäläinen) has
produced quite a lot of the material I use
Me as a “career researcher”
”Everyone can have a career in the future, but not
everyone is aware of the possibility that they can
shape their future careers”
In other words, most of us use more time in planning our
next vacation than in planning our careers...
http://ek.multiedition.fi/oivallus/fi/liitetiedostot/arkisto/Oivallus-poster.pdf
Work life in the future?
… It is music that includes qualities such as
“swinging”, improvising, group interaction,
developing an “individual voice” and being “open”
to different musical possibilities.
More and more work is being detached from
routines.
 Tasks are not strictly defined.
Competence is built in relation to
others and it is used as part of a
whole.
Fewer and fewer jobs
are done in isolation.
The goal is known but there are
no specific instructions on how
to reach it.
 Precise notes are lacking.
The end result can be reached
in various different ways.
 Improvisation, creativity and
sailing by the wind are daily
tools and requirements for
success.
Work life is based on teams
that work together to solve a
problem or to create
something new.
Multiple skills are the
sum of a team’s competences.
Changes also reflect to management. The role of the leader may
vary depending on the situation, project or special competence
just like in jazz where leadership typically is changed on the fly….
What is a career?
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Series of jobs
Progress, vertical movement
Profession, movement between certain kind of tasks
Individual, sequential choises – life career
Self-satisfying progress and professional development
Growth in competence, skills, know-how and expertice
Development process of professional identity (or even
personality)
What is career planning?
Career Services,
University of Oulu
Hit-and-miss or master plan?
Making choices
Building expertise
Mastering one’s own know-how –
knowledge, skills, learning ability
Creating potential for coincidences
Building expertise from experience
International Association for
Educational and Vocational Guidance
Career Development vs. Career Management
• Career development
• Lifelong learning process involving
planning, acting in and moving between
different occupational roles
• Career management
• Structured, target-oriented planning and
active management of one's own
professional career
• Career management skills
Satu Lähteenmäki
”Career behaviour”
= action related to one’s own career and professional
goals
• Inner Pull-factors; values, personal meanings and
experiences…
• Social Push-factors; raising from culture and
surroundings, role-determined attitudes related to
gender, profession and positions…
• Personal factors; traits, personality, self-direction,
self-respect, self-concept…
Maria Järlström
Career competences
- know why, know who, know whom
• Motivation – Why am I making certain choices? What
motivates me to choose certain career, job and life
style?
• Values, attitudes, needs (motivation), identity
• Skills – How is my know-how compounded?
• Skills, expertise, prowess, tacit vs. conscious
knowledge, experience
• Networks – Who do I know?
• Relationships, connections
Career Services,
University of Oulu
Knowing yourself and planning your career
 doing things
Knowing
Doing
CAREER
PLANNING
Career Services,
University of Oulu
Starting point
Family, relationships, studying, work history, goals
Self-knowledge
Work life knowledge
Professions, branch,
Competence requirements
Competence, personality, values,
interests, resources, health
Information Processing
Action Plan
Setting and specifying your goals
Setting smaller steps towards your goals
Concrete plan how to achieve your goals
- What skills and experience do I need, how and when do I get those..?
Updating your plan
Oxford Concise Dictionary
What is research?
• the systematic investigation into and study of
materials, sources etc. in order to establish facts and
reach new conclusions
• an endeavour to discover new or collate old facts
etc. by the scientific study of a subject or by a course
of critical investigation
Harold Somers
What is research?
• Research is what we do when we have a question or a
problem we want to resolve
• We may already think we know the answer to our
question already
• We may think the answer is obvious, common sense
even
• But until we have subjected our problem to rigorous
scientific scrutiny, our 'knowledge' remains little more
than guesswork or at best, intuition.
Classical scientific method
• Observation of some phenomenon
• Maybe systematic, occasional or accidental
• Some idea of an explanation (hypothesis)
• Induction, conjecture, intuition, guesswork
• Usually informed by related work
• Testing of the hypothesis
• Test and revision cycle
CAREER PLANNING
vs. SCIENTIFIC METHOD
Career Services,
University of Oulu
Starting point
Family, relationships, studying, work history, goals
Self-knowledge
Work life knowledge
Professions, branch,
Competence requirements
Competence, personality, values,
interests, resources, health
Information Processing
from guesswork to knowledge
Action Plan
Setting and specifying your goals
Setting smaller steps towards your goals
Concrete plan how to achieve your goals
- What skills and experience do I need, how and when do I get those..?
testing the hypothesis / experimenting
Updating your plan
Gary W. Peterson, James P. Sampson
& Robert C. Reardon
Career planning as knowledge processing
The Pyramid of Information Processing Domains
Metacognitions
Thinking
about my
decision making
Knowing how I make
decisions
Self-Knowledge
Knowing about
myself
Knowing about
my options
Decision-Making Skills
Options Knowledge
How to become aware of my
strenghts and skills?
My skills and know-how
• Starting point:
 Identifying your own skills and know-how
 Believe in your skills and know-how
 Ability to describe it with examples and
achievements
• It’s important to believe in your personal
competence, but also to recognize the
areas you want to develop.
Where to start
– knowing yourself (Identify)
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What kind of work are you interested in?
What kind of work experience do you have?
What are you good at?
What are you interested in?
What skills have you got?
What are your career goals?
What skills and experience do you need to achieve
them?
This information you’ll need in your application
Experience and competence (Identify)
• What kind of competences and skills you’ve got?
• Do you have some special skills that you could emphasis?
• What kind of assigments you have succeeded best in your
previous jobs? Why?
• What kind of assigments have been most challenging /
difficult for you? Why?
• What kind of skills and competences you need to develope
/ gain more?
• What is your best achievement so far?
• What have you learned from your previous employments?
Remember – everyone’s set of expertise, skills and
competences is unique!
What can You be with a Degree?
Anything!
Believe!
Try on Your own (describe)
”Letter to your grandmother”
and / or
”Elevator speech”
Letter to Your grandmother
• Practice to describe your skills
• Write a letter to your grandmother telling her;
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What do you study/research?
What have you learned in your studies/research?
What is the topic of your doctoral thesis?
How would your dream job be like?
• Remember to put it in an understandable way – tell
things in a way that
”even your grandmother would understand it”!
Elevator speech
• What would you say, if you met a person who could
lead you to your dream job and you had only 30
seconds to state your case?
Who are you?
What are you looking for?
What kind of industry and organization are you
interested in?
What kind of work would inspire you the most?
What do you offer?
What are the main contributions you can make?
What kind of competence, experience and
achievements do you have that make you stand out
from all the other candidates?
Planned happenstance
Should “what-you-should-be-when-you-grow-up” be
planned in advance?
What do we know about Your Future
• We do not know what new occupations will be
developed.
• We now have people employed as web masters,
instructional technology experts, and tech support
specialists. Such occupations could never have been
predicted just a few years ago.
• We cannot be sure which current occupations will
diminish. What happened to elevator operators, slide
rule manufacturers, and top hat sales persons?
The occupation You will end up for most of Your career
might not be invented yet!
What do we know about Your Future
• Being undecided can be reframed as openmindedness.
• The adjective undecided seems to have a negative
connotation in our society.
• wishy-washy or a flip-flopper.
• So if you are undecided about your future (as indeed
every sensible person should be), don’t call yourself
undecided, call yourself open-minded.
• You’ll get more respect even though the two terms
mean the same thing.
HLT
• We have no way of knowing in advance the destiny
of any individual
 yet we would like to understand the factors that
influence that destiny
• The Happenstance Learning Theory (HLT) is an
attempt to explain how and why individuals follow
their different paths through life
HLT
• The situations in which individuals find themselves
are partly a function of factors over which they have
no control and partly a function of actions that the
individuals have initiated themselves.
• Individuals may focus their attention exclusively on
the factors over which they have no control and
conclude that they are in the hands of fate and that
nothing they do matters.
HLT
• Every situation can be seen as presenting potential
opportunities if individuals can recognize them and
then take action to capitalize on them.
• The interaction of planned and unplanned actions in
response to self-initiated and circumstantial situations
is
• so complex that the consequences are virtually
unpredictable
• and can best be labeled as happenstance.
Krumboltz, J. D. The Happenstance Learning Theory. 2009.
Journal of Career Assessment 17(2):135-154
http://jca.sagepub.com/content/17/2/135.abstract
My Story 
Today here with
you
Worked in a
career couching
project
Ready to crasp
the job
opportunity
Thought about
- good at doing
- like to do
Thesis support
project
My course was
cancelled –
what instead
Teaching and
reseaching at
Dept. of B
Career decisions are not a one-time event but occur
continually throughout life.
Keeping options always open means that new
opportunities must be created, recognized, and
seized.
So. Maybe.
“What-you-should-be-when-you-grow-up” need not and
should not be planned too strictly in advance.
”There are different paths to the same end”
(Lustbader, The Ring of Five Dragons”)
THANK YOU!