What shape is your career? - How to develop your healthcare

This might seem like an odd question to ask – but we often see careers represented by ladders, or an arrow on a graph moving diagonally up and across the page. Thinking of your career in this way can be challenging. In guidance, we often encounter young graduates and final-year students who are really frightened of taking the first step in starting their career: ‘What if I choose the wrong specialism?’ ‘What if I start in the wrong job?’ ‘What if I limit my chances by staying close to home?’
Thinking of your career in a linear or laddered way can exacerbate such fears. Clearly, if your career was a straight trajectory, beginning at 21 and not stopping until retirement, then where you start would be critical: but career is not that shape at all. Given all we know about the influencing factors, then your career at its most simple is going to look far more like a staircase, but one that has many plateaus or landings, and it may be that you will take a few steps down at points in your life before climbing another flight.


Factors that influence our career

There are many factors affecting what we do, and this section tries to briefly summarise some of the more commonplace that might affect your own choices.
As you read through this list, consider the following questions:
What factors have influenced you in the past?
What factors are influencing you at present?
What are the factors that might have a bearing on the future?
Are there actions that you need to take or be prepared for?Personal factors: Things about you that might affect your choices and opportunitiesMotivations and values: What is important to you?
Beginning with such a broad question might feel overwhelming, but what is important to you influences your day-to-day decisions, your longer term choices, and will not remain static as you move through life. Your values can influence what you do, why you do it, who you do it with and for, and how much you expect to get paid for it! Using value audits can be a really helpful way to test your motivations (an exercise is included at the end of the book), but they can also help you to understand why you feel more confident in one role or organisation than another.

The importance of values

It is sometimes easy to overlook the importance of values when we consider career. Quite often when a client presents in careers guidance feeling very confused about their career choice and unsure how to move forward, it turns out that there is friction between what motivates the client and where they have found themselves in their career. For example, if someone is motivated by the need to work collaboratively and for a common purpose, but finds themselves in an organisation that is working competitively for tenders, then this may lead to them feeling unhappy or uncomfortable. In such circumstances, they may choose to focus their energy on trying to find a new employer – but sometimes this is not practical, and at such times, it is often good simply to acknowledge where there are incompatibilities, and consider strategies that might help. It is probably not realistic to think that all of our values will ‘find a home’ in our career – but the closer you align your values to what you do, the greater your sense of career fulfilment.
Values matter to employers, too. A common shorthand for what employers look for is ‘Can you, will you, fit’:
‘Can you’ – do you have the skills for the job and the ability to learn and develop.
‘Will you’ – do you have the attitude and approach to the work that is going to motivate you
‘Fit’ – do you understand what the organisation does and needs, and will you fit with this?

Clearly values are especially relevant to health professionals and contribute to ideas of professionalism and of professional standards, as explored in Chapter 3.Attributes and strengths: What comes easily to you and what behaviours do you enjoy bringing to your work?

Attributes and strengths offer a slightly different perspective but can be just as valuable in assessing your career choices. The exercises in Chapter 9 ask you to consider what qualities you bring to your work: what attributes come naturally to you? Attributes may influence your career because they can affect how comfortable you feel in a role, for example: If you see yourself as an organiser or galvaniser, then you may naturally find yourself taking these roles in the workplace, and perhaps be the one who suggests new ways of doing things; If you do not feel comfortable organising people, then a role that expects that of you will likely be stressful. Recognising the relationships between what you do and how you do it will help you.

Time for reflection
If you were asked the question ‘What is your greatest strength?’, what answer would you give?