Career Anchors: Personal Values & Career Strengths

Career Anchors: What Are Your Real Values?

When you consider all kinds of peoples jobs and what they do, it is very clear that not everyone has the same ambitions or motivations in work or their career.

Some people are very content to have a quiet, uneventful job, while others thrive on a career full of constant change and excitement. In short, we are all different, and our motivators are an “internal barometer” of who we are and what we want.

These Career Anchors will help you to define exactly what 'turns you on' about work and so make it easier for you to decide what you want, or don't want, from your job or career. Use the statements as a kind of benchmarking for your own ideas.

Dr. Schein outlines eight main career anchors:

• Technical/Functional Competence
• General Management Competence
• Autonomy/Independence
• Security/Stability
• Entrepreneurial Creativity
• Service/Dedication to a Cause
• Pure Challenge
• Lifestyle

How do these motivators relate to you? Each and every one of them is a statement of what you want (or don’t want). To clarify these concepts, described here are the eight anchors and what kind of work fits each.

Career Anchors Participants: Workbook and Self Assessment

1. Technical/Functional: Enjoy using core skills; skills don’t have to be technical in nature; can be a human resources worker or a secretary and enjoy using the skills needed for those positions; motivated by learning new skills and expanding current knowledge base.

   Type of Work: What turns these types on is the exercise of their talent; satisfaction with knowing concepts. If it is not a challenge, technical/functional types feel bored and/or demeaned. Content of actual work more important than the context of the work; In other words, it is the actual work they are concerned with not the organization or the overall mission of their work; teaching and mentoring offers opportunity to demonstrate expertise.

2. General Managerial Competence: view specialization as limiting; primarily want to manage or supervise people; enjoy motivating, training and directing the work of others; enjoy authority and responsibility, and when someone strips of control it is “demotivator;” thrive in three areas of competence – analytical, interpersonal/inter-group, and emotional.

   Type of Work: high levels of responsibility, varied, integrative, leadership.

3. Autonomy/ Independence: need and want control over work and want to be recognized for achievements; can’t tolerate other people’s rules or procedures; need to do things their own way; independent consulting and contract work would be a good fit for these people; want to be left alone to do their work; just give them instructions on what you want, when you want it and let them “go to it!”

   Type of Work: seek autonomous professions such as consulting, teaching, contract or project work, or even temporary work; part or full-time acceptable.

4. Security/Stability: safe, secure, predictable are buzz words; motivated by calmness and consistency of work; don’t like to take chances, and are not risk-takers; stable companies are best bets; strive for predictability, safety, structure, and the knowledge that the task has been completed properly; unused talents may be channeled outside work.

   Type of Work: stability and predictability are key; emphasis on context of job rather than content or work (in other words, pay, benefits, work environment most important).

5. Entrepreneurial Creativity: like the challenge of starting new projects or businesses, have lots of interests and energy, and often have multiple projects going at once; different from autonomy in that the emphasis is on creating new business; often pursuing dreams at early age.

   Type of Work: strong need to create something new; bored easily; inventions; restless; constantly seeking new creative outlets.

6. Service/Dedication to a Cause: motivated by core values rather than the work itself; strong desire to make the world a better place.

   Type of Work: high concentration of service-oriented professions, motivated by pursuit of personal values and causes.

7. Pure Challenge: strongest desire is overcoming obstacles; conquering, problem-solving; competition; winning; constant self-testing; single-minded individuals.

   Type of Work: careers where competition is primary.

   Let me illustrate that particular aspect of career anchors more fully;

   Pure Challenge

   If your key Career Anchor is pure challenge, what you would not give up is the opportunity to work on solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems, to succeed over tough opponents, or to overcome difficult obstacles. For you, the only meaningful reason for pursuing a job or career is that it permits you to succeed in the fact of the impossible. Some people find such pure challenge in intellectual kinds of work, such as the engineer who is only interested in impossibly difficult designs; some find the challenge in complex, multi-faceted situations, such as the strategy consultant who is only interested in clients who are about to go bankrupt and have exhausted all other resources; some find it in interpersonal competition, such as the professional athlete or the salesperson who defines every sale as either a win or a loss. Novelty, variety and difficulty become ends in themselves, and if something is easy, it becomes immediately boring.

8. Lifestyle: have a high need to balance work and the rest of life; enjoy work, but realize that work is just one of many parts of life that are important; subscribe to philosophy of “work to live”, rather than “live to work.”

   Type of Work: careers must be integrated with the rest of life flexibility; desire to work with organizations that accept and promote balance; some individuals unwilling to relocate for reasons of life balance.

These are the main career anchors outlined by Schein and measured by his Career Orientations Inventory. In his book he discusses the concept of the career anchor in-depth, raising such thought-provoking questions as:

• Are there other career anchors?
• Can one have more than one anchor?
• Do anchors change? And finally,
• How does one match individual needs and those of the organizations?

When embarking on career exploration, the concept of career anchors is just one of many useful self-assessment scales. It is a way of pinpointing who you are and what you want, so you can better define what you are seeking in a job.

Source: Schein, Edgar H., Career Anchors: Discovering Your Real Values, San Diego: Pfeiffer & Company, University Associates, Inc., 1990.

These Career Anchors descriptions as above will help you to define exactly what 'turns you on' about work and so make it easier for you to decide what you want, or don't want, from any job or career you might be considering. Use the statements as a kind of benchmarking for when you have a job offer on the table to decide whether it does meet your needs based on your values.

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Go Back to Career Options Page or continue to Key Strengths Page because understanding your Key Strengths and being able to talk comfortably and convincingly about what makes YOU the ideal candidate to hire is one of the most important self describing skills you must master. It also enables you to answer the job interview questions applicants commonly have to answer - and if you know your real values based on these career anchors, then you will never find yourself in the wrong job.

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