Career Planning – Say No to Your Intuition .Parts 4

  By Shuki Stauber

 
Jobs Employment, Career Job, Employment Job

Motti: A person's career anchor consists of important characteristics, including tendencies, values, motivations and talents. These elements guide his choice of which profession to pursue and which jobs to engage in. When these elements do not sufficiently match the work he does, difficulties and a lack of gratification arise. Proper career planning means one must evaluate his career job anchors and seek jobs and tasks suited to them. 

The primary career anchors researchers have identified are as follows:
Autonomy – An anchor that characterizes people who find it difficult to work at large organizations and prefer to be "independent." An employee graced with this anchor will not last long at a large, bureaucratic organization. He will grab at the first opportunity to leave and open a business.
Creativity and initiative – An anchor that characterizes people who organize their career around the need to create something new of their own. They can be found in marketing, advertising, public relations and perhaps software development. This is also the place for entrepreneurs setting up their own business.
Security and stability – An anchor that characterizes people who attribute great weight to career stability. A myth has been created around this anchor of entering an organization at the age of 20 and retiring from it at the age of 60+, preferably with minimal changes throughout the decades.
General management – An anchor that characterizes people whose career focuses on climbing he corporate ladder toward executive positions. People with this anchor are seeking a position of influence and responsibility. Only jobs with a direct connection between individual effort and personal reward will satisfy their desire.
Technical or functional work – An anchor that characterizes people who organize their career around a specific professional ability they were graced with. The impulse that drives these people to change jobs and companies is maximizing the opportunity to face challenges in their specific area of expertise. When a technical expert receives an offer to advance to another job and do a different type of work in which he does not have expertise, he will turn down even an offer that appears very attractive to others.