Answering Your Questions – Part 5
I hear this shift often from clients at different stages of their careers.
Let me start with a few general comments.
Our experiences of, our relationship with, and the meaning work and career hold for us are constantly evolving over the course of our working lives. Our skills, capacities, expertise, and professional knowledge likewise evolve continuously. Concurrently, the work environments we are part of – their systems, structures, and mandates; the specific professional fields and the work we are tasked with or responsible for; and the parameters of our roles – are also constantly evolving.
This means that career or job alignment, or “fit,” is complex and dynamic across our working lives.
While we often frame career development as finding the “best fit” or alignment with a role or work environment, we rarely consider how the dynamic contexts – and I’ve suggested a few – shift, intersect, and reshape our experiences and engagement with work and our careers over time. Nor how they impact what “fit” and alignment mean at different career stages.
Let me zero in on some of the changes we can experience in our working lives.
A job, role, or set of responsibilities may appeal at one stage of life for several reasons: gaining professional experience, developing specific skills and expanding one’s expertise, achieving a degree of financial stability, or engaging in work that aligns with one’s values.
At another stage, other areas of our lives may take priority, shifting what work means to us.
Our aspirations, goals, and expectations about work and about our careers more generally undergo reassessment and will likely change over time.
We outgrow roles. When a role has little room to expand or grow alongside our development and interests, we may start to feel its stagnation and an increasing sense of misalignment.
If our role and responsibilities change frequently without adequate support or resources, if we feel unsupported, or if we work in toxic, unhealthy, even dangerous work environments, we may experience increasing frustration, a lack of motivation, high levels of stress and disengagement, once again changing what the role means to us and how we perceive “fit”.
If the future of a profession, job, or role is uncertain or insecure, we experience, engage with, and commit to it differently. How we define “best fit” then shifts.
These are just a few examples, but they reflect, once again, the continuous, dynamic changes and shifts that happen throughout our careers.
Reflective exercise:
Let’s set aside the constraints of “best fit” and work with these dynamic changes. Consider the following sample reflective questions.
I encourage you to write down your thoughts. This helps you notice recurring themes, see the different contexts at play, identify where they intersect, and assess their impact on your experiences of work and career.
Describe the changes you are experiencing. How long have you felt them?
How have these changes affected your day-to-day work: motivation, engagement, attitude, focus, interest, commitment, and collaboration?
What changes have you noticed in your job, role, and work environment more generally? How have they affected how you work, your responsibilities, and your professional development?
Have your professional interests changed as your experience and skills have expanded? In what ways?
What other life contexts are a priority for you right now? How are these contexts affecting your day-to-day engagement with work and the meaning of work?
Think about your accumulated work, life, education, and volunteer experiences, regardless of your career stage. What kinds of roles and responsibilities are you growing into or moving towards? Why?
What would you like to change right now? Why? How would you modify your current role to better align with your experience, skills, and interests?
Given the changes you are experiencing, what new questions are you asking about your career and its future?
Where do you have some space and choice to initiate your own changes? What is one change or modification you could start right now?
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