Career counseling has become a major field in the last fifty years and is filled with various kinds of tools, surveys, programs, and workshops that promise you not only self‐insight but, in some cases, even a job at the end of the program. The career anchors work started with the research panel that Ed Schein launched in the early 1960s but did not produce any useful research results until the 1970s when revisiting the panel members revealed this concept of career anchors and helped to define concepts and workshops for mid‐career adults to supplement the already massive programs that were present for those just beginning their careers.

Apart from the research results on the importance of anchors as an aspect of mid and later careers, Ed discovered that the research interviews were received by everyone as a unique experience of self‐discovery. Almost everyone said, after the experience how “this is the first time that anyone has ever asked me this question, so for the first time I am thinking about my work and my career.”

It was this insight that led to evolving the booklet and the exercises that went through four editions in the last 40 years and is now confronting an entirely different world because of technological and social changes, as well as the impact of the pandemic. The point is that there is today not only much more help available to the mid‐career occupant but an even greater need for such help as the world of work has become more volatile and complex.

We cannot possibly review all that is available, but we feel that two concepts are now so widely used that it is worth commenting on how they relate to Career Anchors—The Clifton StrengthsFinder 2.0 (2007) and the Myers‐Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

Career Anchors and StrengthsFinder 2.0 (aka CliftonStrengths)

The CliftonStrengths assessment was developed by Don Clifton to help managers, leaders, job seekers, and others to develop self‐insight and self‐awareness about what they can “bring to the table.” More information is available at https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/252137/home.aspx.

What are an individuals' personality characteristics that should be featured or will be visible in interactions with other people, particularly in interview or influence interactions? CliftonStrengths is not focused on helping you address or answer to your weaknesses, nor is it about helping you appear “well‐rounded.” It is about your five or more key strengths. If I know my “CliftonStrengths,” I can more persuasively, if not authentically, represent who I am and how and why I can add value.

In this sense, CliftonStrengths is very much complementary with Career Anchors. Still, there is a core difference between the two models—Career Anchors reflect how and why we have made our career choices. Our personality and preferences factor into these decisions, as do many other factors. CliftonStrengths does not necessarily assume one has a multiyear base of career decisions to tap into for self‐insight. In this sense anchors and strengths in combination provide a richer view, a richer dimensionality to self‐insight that you can bring to the early career job search, mid‐career pivot, or encore career remake.

To have a sense of how CliftonStrengths and Career Anchors might relate to each other or map to each other, the following table lists strengths and the anchors that may well be associated with the personality characteristic. This association is anecdotal and layered—any individual will have multiple CliftonStrengths just as they will have prominent anchors and unimportant anchors. Our list below includes a couple anchors that we would expect to be associated with each of the CliftonStrengths; we will leave it up to the reader to fill in the picture of all of the strengths and anchors. In the end, the goal is more insight and self‐awareness gained by looking at the assessments side by side.

Career Anchors and the Myers‐Briggs Type Indicator (aka MBTI)

MBTI is another very popular and common personality assessment for first‐time job seekers all the way through to very high‐level executive candidates. It is worthwhile reading about the history and current use of the assessment for individuals and teams at https://www.themyersbriggs.com/en-US.

This assessment keys off four polarities: (1) extroversion vs. introversion; (2) How people gather information, sensing (facts) vs. intuition (patterns); (3) How people tend to make decisions based on gathered data, thinking (factual) vs. feeling (emotional); and (4) How people process the world around them through, judging (structure in categories) vs. perceiving (unstructured and open).

The MBTI assessment then bundles the four dimensions such that there are 4×4 combinations, that is, 16 patterns of personality to which colorful descriptors are assigned. Once again, in the spirit of layering insights on insights, consider these loose associations of MBTI and Career Anchors:

There is no doubt that this mapping of anchors to MBTI could be debated, shifted around with good arguments supporting changes. MBTI is, nonetheless, used as a clustering—it says little about who you are to know that you are an introvert. It says a lot more to know that you are an INTP or ENTJ. This would suggest that if you are an INTP, your anchors would show preferences for Autonomy, Entrepreneurial, Technical‐Functional, and Service. It turns out this is pretty close, and where it gets a bit muddy for you may be between “thinking” and “feeling” and between “Technical‐Functional” and “Life‐Work Integration.” So perhaps the mapping is not exact. Regardless, you may learn more about yourself when comparing Career Anchors to MBTI and notice some discrepancies or head scratchers.

In the table below, we list the MBTI characteristics and their descriptors and suggest which career anchors may map into these 16 personality types. These 16 personality types are described in detail on The Myers‐Briggs Company (formerly CPP, Inc) website, at https://www.themyersbriggs.com/en-US/Resources/MBTI-Shareables.

Again, as a personality assessment the MBTI can apply to any adult, whether newly graduated from college or about to retire. Career Anchors, as we have said, may not provide as much help to a career seeker with no job experience. For an early career or mid‐career seeker, on the other hand, the mapping of MBTI to Career Anchors patterns could be quite illuminating, whether reinforcing or challenging of career patterns or career choices. In that spirit, let's take this proposed mapping and cluster it alongside the MBTI clusters and descriptors:

This is not exact science, by any stretch of the imagination. It is a triangulation, another angle on things. For those readers who know their MBTI type the career anchors should align to some extent with the MBTI descriptors. And that could be validating or thought‐provoking and ultimately insight generating.

One of the authors was once told that “almost all of the VPs and C‐levels at this company are ENTJ”. It was an odd statement as it suggested little diversity in a management team that was demonstrably more diverse, and it implied a bit of a normative bent that could be quite constrictive in succession planning. “We can only promote ENTJs” would not be the most inclusive way to think about building and then tapping a “strong bench.” With the Career Anchor triangulation, it would nevertheless make some sense that the best candidates to take over senior leadership were those who had made career choices along the way that leaned toward “General Management,” “Entrepreneurship,” “Technical‐Functional” expertise, and “Stability.” This was a maturing technology company. In that light, the MBTI mapping to Career Anchors shows a nice alignment between personality types and career anchor optimizations fit for this company at this stage of maturity.

This triangulation made sense, and if readers find some alignment like this for themselves it's reinforcing and empowering. If the opposite is true, the triangulation makes no sense at all, there will still be insight to be gleaned from the gaps. Why is there no alignment? Is it possible it is in the assessment instruments themselves? Again, this is not an exact science. It may also be that one can make career choices that do not always align with personality traits. Either way, this is a powerful insight to have at any stage of a career journey.