It was partly to lessen this dependency on the employer for career decision making that my colleague, Gladys M. Bishop, and I developed a method for teaching it in a business setting. She had been exposing employees at Polaroid Corporation to new career fields inside the company by arranging temporary assignments in areas that interested them. But she found that employees not turned on by such career exposures rarely gained much insight into why they did not like them. Furthermore, the exposures had not necessarily helped them analyze what kinds of jobs would be more suitable. What these employees needed was not just exposures and tryout-a "shopping around" process-but an opportunity to learn how to identify their own talents systematically before shopping around.
Together we developed the Polaroid Career Direction Workshop to teach employees how to identify their talents for themselves and haw to link these talents to career fields that used them best. This procedure involved group and individual sessions totaling about 10 hours. Emphasis was not on the ultimate outcome, but on learning the process.
In these workshops the participants examined their successful experiences, things they had done well and enjoyed. They described them in detail and analyzed the skills and traits that had made these experiences successful. They could find these events in any period or facet of their lives.
Warren, a high school graduate and truck driver, gave as an example his having climbed Mt. Washington as a youth. Describing it, he said it was his idea, he got some others interested, found a map and studied it, talked with his father about the best route, set up a time schedule, met with the others to decide what food to take and clothes to wear, started on schedule, stopped en route to chat with another party, made the top, admired the view, saw a deer, ran into a thunderstorm, and arrived home on time. Parents were worried but congratulatory.
Out of this description Warren extracted the following skills, values, capabilities, and environmental factors: coming up with ideas, persuading others, leadership, consulting with others, investigating and studying, planning, decision making, goal setting, scheduling, physical exertion, persistence, socializing, group cooperation, achieving goals, appreciation of nature, appreciation of beauty, outdoors, overcoming obstacles, and recognition. Some of these words he and others in the group suggested; some he got from a check list of the most commonly used expressions.
Then Warren described and factored a second achievement, selling the most tickets to his senior class play. He was surprised to find how many of the same talents he had displayed: persuasion, planning, goal setting, persistence, socializing, group activity, goal achieving, overcoming obstacles, and recognition. He was intrigued that two such apparently dissimilar activities as mountain climbing (a sport) and ticket selling (an extracurricular school activity) called for some of the same talents. He was beginning to get out of his own subcultures by learning another kind of language.
This process continued until Warren had described nine or ten achievements and uncovered the skills and characteristics involved. By logging them on a simple chart, he was able to determine which occurred most frequently and to detect a pattern of common-denominator talents. These were the talents he had actually enjoyed and used successfully in the past and could count on enjoying and using successfully in the future. As Bernard Haldane, who pioneered this concept, commented in his recent book, Career Satisfaction and Success, "When you have identified the strong threads of your motivated skills, you will find they weave together into a lifeline that gives job freedom as you choose you're changing career paths".
This self-analysis of one's past successful experiences to discover talents is the first stage in the career decision-making process. It capitalizes on the principles that people are the products of their past experiences and that emphasizing accomplishments helps them become aware of their own worth.
Second Stage
Once Warren had organized his own personal talent bank he was ready to go to the second stage of the Career Direction search that is, analyzing jobs and careers for the talents (qualifications) required and determining whether or not he had them.
He looked at once into career fields or clusters, either inside or outside the company that held some interest for him and could use his talents. He could either browse through the 22 "Areas of work" in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (Vol. II) or the 13 groupings in the Occupational Outlook Handbook. He could also get leads from the Office of Education charts of 15 occupational clusters. He could have accomplished the same thing by talking to people in his areas of interest.
As he surveyed various occupations he kept his eye on the talents they required and compared them to his own. At this point he did not allow himself to be deterred by the sometimes formidable education and training requirements. The cluster he looked up first in the Occupational Outlook Handbook was air transportation. As he had found he had skills with people, he analyzed the air transportation job descriptions for people activities. Having learned the terminology as it applied to himself, he could now spot it in job descriptions. For instance, aircraft air traffic controllers communicate with pilots; aircraft mechanics obtain descriptions of problems from pilots; airline dispatchers confer with captains; flight attendants help make passengers comfortable; pilots supervise other crew members; reservation clerks sell tickets. These are all people skills required on the job and, thus, desirable as qualifications for the job.
The aim, though, was not to get Warren to decide whether he wanted to be an airline dispatcher or traffic controller, or even to work in that cluster, but to get practice identifying talents required by jobs in terms of his own particular skills. He could use this art repeatedly in exploring careers.
A shipper at Millipore Corporation in Bedford, Massachusetts, listed eight achievements and from these developed half a dozen key talent areas: mobility/physical, manual/mechanical, numbers, working closely with people, learning/observing/following instructions, and planning/ following through/getting results. He came up with two quite different career directions: police officer and all-around maintenance mechanic. The fact that they appeared occupationally unrelated did not bother him; he could see they were linked by his six primary talent areas.
As there were no current openings for police officers in his home town or for maintenance mechanic at Millipore, he was considered for another job as an electrical helper. In his interview he produced tangible evidence of the skills that qualified him for that job even though he had no previous electrical experience. The electrical foreman was impressed and took him on.
A dramatic outcome like this is not necessarily the prime purpose of the workshop. Among working adults who participate, usually 25 per cent report that they find new career directions. Another 25 per cent say that it confirms for them that they are in the right careers. And 50 per cent feel it helps them to organize their thoughts, spot unrealized talents, enlarge their view of themselves, and gain confidence. To illustrate, a typically frustrated secretary came to realize during the workshop that she was really good at figures. Thus assured, she asked her boss for some project involving numbers and he promptly obliged. He had never dreamed she would be interested!
