Career anchors
Career Management
November 2008
What defines the “career anchors”?
While accumulating experience people
acquire information about themselves in
three basic areas:
1. They discover their true motives and
needs
2. They discover the talents and skills they
possess
3. They discover their feelings of comfort or
discomfort in various work situations
What is the career anchor?
• Career anchor is the evolving self-image,
including self-perceptions of motives, skills
and values
• The more life and work experience, the
stronger the sense of who we are and the
stronger the anchor
• The anchor is those elements of the selfimage that people would not give up if they
are forced to make a choice
Types of career anchors
1. Autonomy / independence
• People need and want control over work and want to be
recognized for achievements; can’t tolerate other people’s
rules or procedures; need to do things in their own way;
independent consulting and contract work would be a good
fit for these people; want to be left alone to do their work;
just give them instructions on what you want, when you want
it and let them “go to it!”
• Type of work selected: seek autonomous professions such
as free-lance consulting, teaching, independent smallbusiness people, contract or project work, or even
temporary work; part or full-time acceptable.
Types of career anchors
2. Security / stability
People need long-range stability and security, after that they
need to relax
• For these people: safe, secure, predictable are buzz words;
motivated by calmness and consistency of work; don’t like to
take chances, and are not risk-takers; stable companies are
best bets; strive for predictability, safety, structure, and
the knowledge that the task has been completed properly;
unused talents may be channeled outside work.
• Type of Work: stability and predictability are key;
emphasis on context of job rather than content or work (in
other words, pay, benefits, work environment most
important).
Types of career anchors
3. Entrepreneurial creativity
People need to be personally creative in building something
larger than themselves. They measure themselves by the
success of this enterprise.
• People like the challenge of starting new projects or
businesses, have lots of interests and energy, and often
have multiple projects going at once; different from
autonomy in that the emphasis is on creating new business;
often pursuing dreams at early age.
• Type of Work: strong need to create something new; bored
easily; inventions; restless; constantly seeking new creative
outlets.
Types of career anchors
4. Pure challenge
People discover that what they need is a sense of
challenge or surmountable obstacles, or powerful
opponents against whom they can compete.
• Here the strongest desire is overcoming
obstacles; conquering, problem-solving;
competition; winning; constant self-testing; singleminded individuals.
• Type of Work: careers where competition is
primary.
Types of career anchors
5. Technical / functional competence
People define themselves by their competence in a certain knowledge
base, skill or a craft. They are the best engineers, mechanics,
surgeons, salespersons and may fail when they are pulled into
managerial jobs.
• People enjoy using core skills; skills don’t have to be technical in
nature; can be a human resources worker or a secretary and enjoy
using the skills needed for those positions; motivated by learning
new skills and expanding current knowledge base.
• Type of Work: What turns these types on is the exercise of their
talent; satisfaction with knowing concepts. If it is not a challenge,
technical/functional types feel bored and/or demeaned. Content
of actual work more important than the context of the work. In
other words, it is the actual work they are concerned with not the
organization or the overall mission of their work; teaching and
mentoring offers opportunity to demonstrate expertise.
Types of career anchors
6. General managerial competence
People want to manage other people, to integrate functions and
to be responsible for an entire unit or an organization. They
measure their progress by climbing up the managerial
ladder, showing analytical skills, interpersonal and group
skills, emotional capacity to deal with high level of
responsibility
• People view specialization as limiting; primarily want to
manage or supervise people; enjoy motivating, training and
directing the work of others; enjoy authority and
responsibility, and when someone strips of control it is
“demotivator;” thrive in three areas of competence –
analytical, interpersonal/intergroup, and emotional.
• Type of Work: high levels of responsibility, varied,
integrative, leadership.
Types of career anchors
7. Service or dedication
People define themselves by commitment to some
deep value as teaching, environmentalism, human
resource management, medicine, defence of the
country, etc.
• People are motivated by core values rather than
the work itself; strong desire to make the world a
better place.
• Type of Work: high concentration of serviceoriented professions, motivated by pursuit of
personal values and causes.
Types of career anchors
8. Lifestyle
This anchor is not specifically related to career but to
integration of work and family issues – the working career is
organized around the career of a spouse or in terms of the
geographic area in which they want to live
• People have a high need to balance work and the rest of
life; enjoy work, but realize that work is just one of many
parts of life that are important; subscribe to philosophy of
“work to live”, rather than “live to work.”
• Type of Work: careers must be integrated with the rest
of life flexibility; desire to work with organizations that
accept and promote balance; some individuals unwilling to
relocate for reasons of life balance.