The Psychology of Career Decisions: Sharon Belden Castonguay (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Sharon Belden Castonguay’s talk titled “The Psychology of Career Decisions” at TEDxWesleyanU conference.

Adult developmental psychologist and career counselor Sharon Belden Castonguay’s talk, “The Psychology of Career Decisions,” delves into the complex interplay between personal identity and career choices, underscoring the often underappreciated psychological factors that influence professional paths. She highlights the profound impact of personal identities, such as being a runner or a parent, on our professional lives and how losing or changing these identities can have significant emotional consequences.

Castonguay discusses the historical context of career decision-making, noting how shifts from pre-industrial societies to the digital age have transformed the way individuals approach their career paths. She critiques the modern emphasis on following one’s passion, suggesting that this advice does not universally apply and overlooks the practical and financial considerations many face.

The talk also explores the role of design thinking as a method for navigating career decisions in an era dominated by rapid technological change and uncertainty about the future of work. Castonguay argues for the importance of self-awareness and the recognition of unconscious biases in making more informed and fulfilling career choices. Ultimately, she emphasizes that understanding our personal and professional identities as fluid and evolving can help us navigate the complexities of the job market and our career trajectories more effectively.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Recently, I was forced to assume an alternate identity. It started with this cane. I suffered a knee injury. And while I will soon have surgery and be able to walk normally again, my orthopedist assures me that my running days are over.

Now, for those of you who only run when chased, you may be thinking, what a stroke of luck. A doctor-sanctioned excuse not to work out. But since picking up running after college, it’s become more than just a pastime for me, but part of who I am. Runner has become one of my identities, and giving up that identity has turned out to be more painful than the injury itself.

A Multifaceted Identity

Now, like everybody, I have a lot of identities. A woman, a mother, an American, a proud native of Rhode Island. I’ve had a number of professional identities in my life. Tour guide, camp counselor, school teacher, graduate student in developmental psychology, podcast host, career counselor. And it has been my career counseling practice that I’ve come to recognize how personal identities can affect and create professional identities.

I’m going to talk a little bit more about how and why this is so, but first I’d like to address why it’s important. According to Gallup, 87% of employees worldwide are not engaged in their work. Now, there are a lot of people who study this phenomenon, largely because it has a pretty substantial effect on the bottom line.

Now, the organizations and consultants that study this tend to look at the external factors for why people are not engaged, things like office culture or wages. As a career counselor, I’m more interested in internal reasons, like why someone chose a particular line of work in the first place.

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And my field of career development has looked at this somewhat differently over time. Of course, throughout much of human history, people didn’t actually choose a line of work. You basically did whatever your parents did, and what you did for a living was prescribed by where you were from, your gender, and your social class.

The Evolution of Career Choice

But during the first and second industrial revolutions, as people started moving from the farms into the cities, the world of work broadened. And the very first career counseling office opened in 1908. The Vocational Bureau was located in Boston’s North End neighborhood and served the local community free of charge to help them navigate this new world of work. They interviewed them extensively about their backgrounds, skills, and interests, and provided background about local employers.

Now, obviously, this wasn’t a particularly widespread phenomenon, but the military started to take an interest in their work. They needed to figure out a way of putting workers placed into jobs to help serve the war efforts during World War I and World War II. And by the Second World War, they had a lot of psychologists that they had hired to develop tests specifically for this purpose.

Career Counseling in the Modern Era

Some of these tests are actually still used today in various forms, and it’s possible that some of you have taken them, maybe through a high school guidance counselor or through an employer. Now, by the time I started in the field of career counseling in the late ’90s, we were in the midst of the third industrial revolution, the digital age. And the testing industry was still alive and well, but by then a new paradigm had emerged that held that what we really needed to be concerned about was our client’s passion. “Do what you’re passionate about and you’ll never work a day in your life,” right?

I remember early on attending a professional development session with a woman who was considered one of the biggest names in my field, a very successful author. She told the story of a client with whom she had worked who was really difficult simply because she didn’t have any clearly articulated passions.

Finally, one day in desperation, the counselor said to her, “Give me a sense of something you’re interested in, anything at all.” The woman kind of shrugged somewhat sheepishly and said, “Well, I’ve always been kind of interested in gorillas.” Triumphant, the counselor announced that she had gone on to work for a local zoo, and voila, problem solved, passion wins.

Now, at the time, I was working with business students who, generally speaking, were not interested in gorillas. In fact, I found that the dirty little secret of most MBAs was that they had gone back to school because they didn’t like their first jobs out of college.

And they were looking for a socially acceptable way of hitting the restart button. If I suggested to them that they should find their passion, they would respond that they were tens of thousands of dollars in debt and that while they were interested in finding a good professional fit, they were primarily interested in generating a paycheck.

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Navigating Careers in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Now, over the last 10 or 15 years, there’s actually been quite a bit of pushback around the idea of passion dictating career decisions. And there’s a couple of reasons for why this is. One is that most people have no earthly idea what their passions are.

But another reason for this pushback comes from fear of the fourth industrial revolution. What difference does it make if we’re passionate about something, if artificial intelligence is going to take away all the jobs? Even those who embrace our robot overlords will admit that no one really knows what the jobs are going to be 20, 10, even 5 years down the road. So how do we help people navigate career decisions in this new world order?

One potential framework that has emerged from this conversation comes actually from the field of design. The design thinking process holds that designers work with clients to really get to know them well, understand their problems, help define them. They work with them to brainstorm possible ideas and prototypes, and then test out possible solutions.

Those who are proponents of applying design thinking to career decision making hold that people who are working today need to go through a lot of different iterations for the jobs that they do. They might have to try on many different selves and avoid prematurely foreclosing on any one area.

Understanding Self in Career Decisions

The problem with that is that most people don’t have the self-awareness to do that well. Most people don’t take the time to figure out who they are before making a decision about what they want to be.

Now if there’s one thing that we have learned from the field of behavioral economics and psychology in recent years is that we as humans are not nearly as rational as we thought we were. For example, we are predisposed to make bad financial decisions like spending too much money today and not saving enough for our future selves to enjoy retirement. I suggest that we are just as irrational about making career decisions.

Let me give you an example. A number of years ago I was working with a law student. She came into my office very upset. She had just received her grades for the year and realized that she had done so poorly that she was going to be locked out of the jobs that would pay her the kind of salary that was going to be necessary to pay back her considerable law school loans. As she sat there sobbing in my office, she admitted that she simply did not like the study of law. So I said to her, “Well, what made you decide to go to law school?” “Because I didn’t want to go to medical school.”

The Influence of Unconscious Biases

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to you that most people do not make career decisions rationally but rather based on deeply held, often unconscious biases that they receive from their social surround. They’re highly influenced by their parents, their peers, their local communities. And they internalize a lot of these biases that they see around them and they tend to then follow others into things that they have done as well.

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They also tend to internalize messages that they are receiving from their local and national cultures, particularly around personal identities like gender, race, religion, or socioeconomic status. And will tend to either embrace or foreclose on options accordingly, particularly if they anticipate barriers for success.

And let’s acknowledge that a lot of people do face barriers to success, particularly along the lines of gender, race, religion, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation. But this is exactly why I think self-awareness is so important. Because not only can it help us not internalize these biases that are coming from culture, but also help keep us from making false assumptions about others when it comes time for us to do the hiring.

What is tricky is that each of us, as individuals, will internalize and make decisions upon a lot of these unconscious as well as conscious personal identities at different times throughout our lives. And this is going to be constantly in flux.

The Narrative of Career Identity

For those of you who are more quantitatively oriented, allow me to present this as an equation. With career identity being the sum of every possible identity you could have, all influencing you in different ways in different periods of time. A lot of it unconscious. But I will admit this is not my favorite analogy. I tend to think of all of those individual variables, all of those identities, coming together as not an equation, but as a script. A deeply personal life and career narrative that tells the story of who we are and guides our decisions.

This is why in the fourth industrial revolution, we cannot program computers to make career decisions for us. A script is deeply personal, but we also must learn not to just follow it to the letter. We must learn to understand it and question it. Your script is iterative. And like any writing process, it’s likely to be messy. I urge you to embrace that messiness. Own your story. And don’t let others write it for you. And know that this process has always been messy.

If one of my identities is former runner, another of my identities is liberal arts college graduate. And as such, I cannot end a presentation without including a quote from a dead white guy. So I offer you this from Cicero to underscore that throughout time, “This is the most difficult problem in the world.” Thank you very much.