Career Paths for Managers

 

Career

 

During a research managers were asked to define their own idea of career. Through the processes of the
research method, managers agreed that their definition of career had three elements.

• The first, concerning skills education and experience.
• The second, concerning the relationship individuals have with an employer.
• The third element concerned the need to maintain and develop individual lifestyles.

 

So the grounded definition of career that informed this research was:

 

A career is the long-term accumulation of education, skills and experience that an individual sells to an
employer or employers, to try to provide the lifestyle that he or she wants for himself or herself and dependants.

 

Clearly, this definition does not stress employment-based achievement as the outcome of career choices and employment. Rather it concentrates on that individual’s attempt to achieve a balance between work and lifestyle. That is, the managers in the research were stating that the purpose of a career was to provide an appropriate lifestyle. They made career decisions that attempted to maintain a balance in the relationship between demands and their aspirations at work and those of the other aspects of their life. Research found that managers made decisions within a personal framework of values, beliefs, aspirations, and expectations concerning appropriate levels of personal satisfaction, either domestically or at work.

Career decisions

 

Some managers are consistent in the way they approach the management of their careers, others are less consistent and respond in a more random way to issues concerning their own career, as revealed in this research.

 

In analyzing data what became apparent was the differences in the extent to which individuals believed, at the beginning of their working lives, they could or should be in control of their working lives. That is through the research there was clear evidence suggesting that many managers, who started work in subordinate posts expected little support for career development from the organizations in which they worked. However, it was only after a period of years working that these individuals recognized that they needed to take greater control of career themselves. Within this broad context of consistency/inconsistency, and locus of control, it also became clear that there were different influences that individuals acknowledged that had an effect on their career decisions and beliefs about their effectiveness in relation to work, lifestyle, and their careers. These were:

• Individual influences: personal attributes such as personal/professional skills, education and perceptions and beliefs concerning effectiveness control and balance.
• Domestic influences: relationships with others of greater or lesser personal significance and the responsibilities that those relationships impose upon the individual.
• Employment influences: providing intrinsic satisfaction but also the means of enabling the individual to satisfy the demands and responsibilities in the other areas of his/her life.

 

Within each of these areas that influence decision-making it was found that there were differences that were expressed which suggested that an individual’s family background, formal education and experience, i.e. his/her personality, framed their perceptions. These set individual evaluations of personal aspirations and satisfaction experienced in the context of decisions made personally, domestically and in employment.

 

It was further found that these aspects provided a framework which individuals applied when evaluating the effects of change in the different areas of their career. For instance, some reported that they responded to changes in satisfaction levels experienced at work, by acknowledging that this was having an effect on their beliefs concerning their effectiveness and the quality of relationships they were experiencing domestically. Several collaborators reported changes in levels of satisfaction, some indicated that there were implications for other aspects of their lives, and some did not. This was because of the way individuals framed their perceptions of these events in a way that was specific to them and, therefore, different from others.