Dr. Seuss:

“… Oh, the places you'll go!

There is fun to be done!

There are points to be scored.

There are games to be won.”

Over the past decade and particularly during the height of the Covid‐19 pandemic, the career concept has undergone a subtle shift. VUCAA has made the notion of a “standard” career increasingly slippery and ambiguous. To think of the career as, say, a lifelong set of formal and more or less predictable steps through job movements and/or promotions to a final stage leading to retirement from the workforce is gradually going out of fashion as impermanence characterizes the occupational landscape. Better to think of occupational and organizational careers as a set of jobs undertaken over time within a given context.

The “External” Career

A career from this broad perspective is what you put on your résumé (or sometimes leave out). It is a formal recounting of your occupational history in terms of the jobs you have held and places you have worked. This more or less objective representation of your work history we call the “external” career to distinguish it from the subjective representation of the career in terms of how we feel about our work over time, how our work becomes attached (or not) to our sense of self or personal identity, and how it organizes our thinking about our occupation.

Examples of external careers include those of tradespeople, who go through formal apprenticeships and licensing; those of physicians, who must complete medical school, internship, residency, rotating through different areas of specialization, eventually moving into a particular practice; or those of general managers, who must go through several business functions, have experience supervising people, rotate through the international division, serve on the corporate staff before being given a generalist job as a division general manager.

In a similar manner, we can talk of career paths that define the necessary or at least the desirable steps to take along the way to some goal job. Clear instances of this kind of explicit and formal path are found in the military and the civil service with their well‐defined ranks, clear rules for how one advances from one rank to another, and the salaries associated with each level.

These are all representations of external careers and say little or nothing at all about how individuals define their career to themselves—what the career means to the person who travels that path. This is the subjective side of careers, the “internal” career.

The “Internal” Career

How internal careers develop is a lengthy and experiential process that depends on real‐world encounters with the work world and the lessons one takes away from such encounters. With each job change or promotion we learn something of what we are good at, what motivates us, and what we value.

This process leads most of us to develop a set of career preferences—from the rudimentary or inchoate in our early work years to a more fully formed set of preferences that come with accumulated experience. These preferences organize our occupational choices and give us a sense of a reasonably coherent internal career even if we hop from job to job, organization to organization, or even from occupation to occupation.

With each educational or job experience, we have an opportunity to learn. It is important that we go beyond just judging each experience as good or bad, fun or not, useful or not and to ask, “What have I learned about myself?” As we grow, we need to learn not only what is “out there” in the arena of work but also what our own reactions are to the experiences. These reactions are best thought of in terms of three specific domains:

1. Skills and competencies. You need to learn from each experience what you are good at; that learning comes both from your own assessment and from the feedback you receive from others.
2. Motives. You need to learn from each experience what it is you really desire; early in life we think we know what we want, what our career aspirations are, but with each experience we discover that there are things we like or don't like, that some of our aspirations are unrealistic, and that we develop new ambitions.
3. Values. You need to learn from each experience what it is you value in the context of what your occupation or organization considers important, what your colleagues value, and how the kinds of organizational cultures you encounter fit with those values.

As we gain experience, we become more familiar with each of these domains until an emergent self‐concept forms composed of what we are good at and not good at, what we want and do not want, and what we value or do not value. This self‐concept builds on whatever insight we have acquired from the experiences of youth, education, and career experience to date. It remains an emergent self‐concept until we have had enough real occupational experience to get to know ourselves in each of these domains.

Such learning may require many years of actual work experience. If you have had many varied experiences and have received meaningful feedback with each one, clarity in your self‐concept will have developed more quickly. But if you have had only a few jobs in the early years of your career or have obtained minimal feedback, you may still be unclear about your competencies, motives, and values.

Your talents, motives, and values may become so intertwined that it may be hard to separate them out. We become better at those things we value and are motivated to do, and we learn to value and become motivated by those things we happen to do well. We also gradually learn to avoid those things that we do not do well, although, without clear feedback, we may cling to illusions about ourselves that set us up for repeated failures. Motivation without talent will eventually fade, just as talent without motivation will gradually atrophy. Conversely, new challenges can reveal latent or hidden talents and introduce a motivation that we simply had not had an opportunity to experience earlier.

Journey toward Self‐Discovery—Career Anchors

As you accumulate work experience, you have the opportunity to make choices; from these choices you begin to ascertain what you really find important. Dominant themes and values emerge that influence your orientation toward life. You may have had a vague sense of these elements earlier but in the absence of actual life experience, you do not know how important they are or how any given talent, motive, or value relates in a subjective hierarchy to other elements of your total personality. Only when you are confronted with difficult choices do you begin to discover and decide what is really important to you.

Clarification and insight provide a basis for making rational and empowered work and career decisions. The self‐concept you are forming begins to function more and more as a guidance system that constrains career choices. You begin to have a sense of what is “you” and what is “not you.” This knowledge keeps you on course or in a safe harbor. As people recount their career choices, they increasingly refer to “being pulled back” to things they have strayed from or, looking ahead, “figuring out what they really want to do” or “finding themselves.”

This process leads people to gradually move from having broad goals to a sense of knowing better what it is that they would not give up if forced to make a choice. Career anchors, as defined here, are the elements in a person's self‐concept that he or she will not give up, even in the face of difficult choices. If work does not permit expression of those anchors, people will find ways of expressing them in their hobbies, in second jobs, or in leisure activities. Work, for some, is just “doing a fair day's work for a fair day's pay” and seen as simply fate, beyond our control. This is especially true in the more machine‐like or automated industries of the past and continues today in certain production functions though less so in what has been dubbed “knowledge work.”

Today, however, we are less likely to settle for the mysterious workings of fate and wish to exercise more control over our careers. The learning process associated with the forming of such career leanings or anchors is increasingly regarded as self‐determined and has been of necessity speeded up by the pandemic and many other changes, as highlighted in Chapter 1. Let's face it: VUCAA has destabilized not only our external careers but our internal careers as well.

We can still think of anchors as stabilizers, but the winds of the pandemic and rapid social and technological change have pushed us into many different directions. These changes in our occupational and organization worlds have led us to new ways of looking at career anchors.

The same patterns of competencies, motives, and values still operate within us as we move through various jobs, but our ability to match these internal anchors with given jobs or organizations has become much less stable and more problematic in recent times. Many occupations and jobs today can be identified with several anchors to a greater degree than in the past which raises the possibility of partially satisfying several of the career anchors rather than looking for “the one thing we would not give up.”

Many of us have found that our career—like a financial portfolio—can become a portfolio of different jobs reflecting different competencies, motives, and values. Some jobs will match well with what we identify as our primary anchors, what we would not give up if forced to make a choice, but we always knew that other anchors were also operating in us. We can now see more clearly that different jobs and even different occupations can satisfy some of the secondary or tertiary anchors that we identify in ourselves.

We can also begin to see that the different anchors overlap and can be thought of as derivative from the prime anchor or anchors. And we can sense that the anchors we associate with our work lives have become entangled much more than we realized with our relationships—to the point that the quality of our work, family, and social relationships have become the primary basis for both our economic and personal well‐being.

It is for the above reason that we began this book with analyzing our relationships before we present the eight career anchors. The basic anchor categories have not changed over time, but their importance to the internal career has evolved. Given that evolution, we now invite you to explore some of the elements of your internal career.