Career Anchors Revisited: Implications for Career Development in the 21st Century
Edgar H. Schein
MIT Sloan School of Management
February, 1996, Revised March, 1996
Abstract
Organizations are today undergoing a metamorphosis. Whether one thinks of it as
"downsizing," "rightsizing," "flattening," becoming a "learning
organization," or simply as "transformations" into something as yet unknown, no
one would challenge the fact that profound changes are occurring worldwide.
These changes in the occupational environment have implications for career
development in the future. Will there even be such a concept as an
"organizational career" or will careers become a more fragmented set of jobs
held together far more by what I have labeled the "internal career." By the
concept of internal career I mean the subjective sense of where one is going in
one's work life, as contrasted with the "external career," the formal stages
and roles that are defined by organizational policies and societal concepts of
what an individual can expect in the occupational structure (Schein, 1978,
1990a)? In studying careers longitudinally it became evident that most people
form a strong self-concept which holds their internal career together even as
they experience dramatic changes in their external career. I called this
self-concept a "career anchor" and found that an understanding of it helped to
illuminate how people made career choices. But will the concept of "career
anchor" still be applicable in this rapidly changing world and what are the
implications for career development as we look at several future scenarios of
how the world might evolve further in the 21st Century (Malone &
Scott-Morton, 1995)?
Career Anchors: Some Speculations on their Evolution
A person's career anchor is his or her self-concept consisting of 1)
self-perceived talents and abilities, 2) basic values, and, most important, 3)
the evolved sense of motives and needs as they pertain to the career. Career
anchors only evolve as one gains occupational and life experience. However,
once the self-concept has been formed, it functions as a stabilizing force,
hence the metaphor of "anchor," and can be thought of as the values and motives
that the person will not give up if forced to make a choice. Most of us are
not aware of our career anchors until we are forced to make choices pertaining
to self-development, family, or career. Yet it is important to become aware of
our anchors so that we can choose wisely when choices have to be made.
My original research in the mid-1970's showed that most people's
self-concepts
revolved around five categories reflecting basic values, motives and needs:
These categories and brief descriptions of what each implies are shown in
Table 1. Additional research has not as yet revealed any other anchor
categories.
As careers and lives evolve most people discover that one of these eight
categories is the anchor, the thing the person will not give up, but
most careers also permit the fulfilling of several of the needs that underlie
different anchors. For example, as a professor I can fulfill my need for
autonomy, for security, for technical/functional competence, and service. I
was not able to discover that my anchor was autonomy until I had to assess how
I felt about being a department chairman and whether or not to become a
candidate for a deanship. It is when we face a job shift through being
promoted, fired, moved geographically or functionally that we confront our
self-image and become aware of our career anchors.
For most of the 1970's and 1980's when we administered the career anchor
self-analysis exercise we obtained fairly consistent results with roughly 25
percent of our populations anchored in "general management," another 25 percent
in "technical/functional competence," 10 percent each in "autonomy" and
"security" and the rest spread across the remaining anchors. (Schein, 1990b).
We found a broad distribution of anchors in every occupation even though one
might imagine that some occupations would be highly biased toward a given
anchor. Even management students who might be expected to have primarily a
general management anchor are spread across the whole spectrum with only about
25 percent in that category. And even with middle managers and senior
executives it rarely goes above 50 percent.
The concept of career anchor becomes especially applicable in today's
turbulent world as more and more people are laid off in the frenzy of
down-sizing and are having to figure out what to do next in their lives. One
might also expect that the content of the anchor will have shifted in the
1990's and will continue to shift as we speculate about the 21st century. What
will those shifts be, and do we see evidence of such shifts already occurring?
Are we already getting different results from our basic populations such as the
various management students that attend the MIT's Masters, Sloan Fellows,
Management of Technology, and Senior Executive Programs?
Shifts in the Content and Structure of Career Anchors
Participants who analyze their career anchors still find the exercise
meaningful and consider it very important to complete, but there has been a
marked shift in what they identify their anchors to be. The results reported
below are of necessity somewhat impressionistic but they allow one to examine
each anchor category and report both what changes have already become visible
and what changes might be anticipated as we look ahead to the 21st century. We
begin with those anchor categories that have shown the most dramatic shifts in
structure and content.
Security/Stability
Individuals anchored in security/stability experience the most severe
problems because of the shift in organizational policies from guaranteeing
"employment security" to touting "employability security." This shift implies
that the only thing the career occupant can really expect of an organization is
the opportunity to learn and gain experience, which presumably makes him or her
more employable in some other organization. What this means internally to the
career occupant is that the base of security and stability has to shift from
dependence on an organization to dependence on oneself.
Self-reliance and self-management are becoming dominant requirements for
future career management. Therefore, individuals who oriented themselves
initially to finding a good employer and staying with that employer for the
duration of their careers have to develop a new way of thinking about
themselves and locate new external or internal structures on which to become
dependent. Symbolically what most reinforces this new image is the breaking up
of "Ma Bell" into dynamic baby bells and ultimately even staid AT&T
breaking up into three units, laying off thousands of people as part of that
process. Similarly, the government bureaucracy as a life time employer can no
longer be relied upon as pressures mount toward decentralization, reducing the
size of government, and making government more efficient. It is not at all
clear where the security anchored person of today can find his or her niche.
Autonomy/Independence
Individuals anchored in autonomy find the occupational world an easier place
to navigate. The autonomy anchor is aligned, at least for the present, with
most organizational policies of promising only employability. The
self-reliance that may be needed in the future is already part of the
psychological make-up of this group of people. They may well become the role
models for future career incumbents. In tracking our various populations it is
also evident that for many people, as they age, their autonomy needs
increase, leading to fantasies of opening up their own businesses,
becoming a consultant, working part-time, and, in other ways, reducing their
dependency on any particular organization or job.
What is not clear is whether the ability to be autonomous depends upon a
baseline of security that we take for granted. The retiree with a good pension
can afford to think creatively about next career steps, but the laid off
mid-life worker or manager without adequate life savings or a well endowed
retirement program may continue to seek secure positions even though his or her
anchor is autonomy. The members of this group who have already built
autonomous careers will be well adapted to the future, but those who have
depended upon secure jobs while planning to break out may be highly vulnerable
to the current restructuring of the labor market even though their anchor is in
line with future options.
Life Style
It is this anchor which has shown the most change since the original research
of the 1960's and 1970's. In the original research the security anchor was
broken into two components: economic security and/or geographic stability.
Most people in this anchor group thought of economic security but a few talked
of stabilizing their life pattern by settling into a given region and refusing
to be moved by their company every few years. In the various follow up
studies done in the 1970's it became evident that these two components were
really different anchors. There were still those who defined their career in
terms of economic security. But there was a growing number who were in dual
career situations and who therefore defined their career as being part of a
larger "life system." They had to integrate two careers and two sets of
personal and family concerns into a coherent overall pattern, best described as
a particular life style. As the number of dual careers increased we also saw
social values in the U.S. shifting toward more autonomy and concern for self
resulting in pre-occupation with life style in most career occupants. For
example, whereas our executive students would have been primarily
technical/functional or general managerial in the 1960's and early 1970's, we
sometimes had classes in the 1980's and thereafter in which as many as 50
percent of the executives considered their career anchor to be life style.
They were impatient with the restrictions of their organizational careers and
were looking for ways to break out.
The trend toward autonomy and life style as anchors is, of course, a healthy
development given the way the world is going. As noted above, the occupational
structure is increasingly moving toward a different concept of the employment
contract in which organizations owe their career occupants less and less.
Organizational position and advancement is increasingly defined in terms of
what one knows and what skills one possesses and based less and less on
seniority or loyalty. But knowledge workers are also more mobile and able to
be autonomous. To retain their best employees organizations must therefore be
able challenge them and meet their needs. No longer is it desirable or
feasible to use golden handcuffs or promises of life time security. Both the
organization and the individual are gradually getting adjusted to the notion
that they have to look out for themselves, which means that organizations will
become less paternalistic and individuals will become more self-reliant. To
the extent that more and more individuals will be in dual career situations,
they will think, plan, and act more as a social unit and organizations will
have to consider how to maintain support systems for such units in the form of
child care, job sharing opportunities, part-time work, sabbaticals, and other
adaptive modifications of the traditional 9 to 5 job. Even the way work is
defined will gradually change as the boundaries between jobs, between
organizations, and between work and family become more fluid and ambiguous
(Bailyn, 1995?)
Technical/Functional Competence
This group is gradually becoming aware of the increasing importance of
knowledge and skill but is confused because it is not entirely acceptable in
today's world to settle for that as one's publicly announced anchor. Hence
most of the people who will admit privately that they enjoy being "somebody"
because their competence is valued, nevertheless espouse publicly that they
want to get into management and "climb the ladder" because that is where the
big rewards are perceived to be. At the same time this group is of necessity
also worried because knowledge and skill become rapidly obsolete in a
dynamically changing technological world and it is not clear who will guarantee
continued education and retraining.
The world will always need craftsmen and experts in specific functions
and, as technological complexity increases, the need for technical experts will
increase. But, as technologies in all the functions themselves change more and
more rapidly, experts will become obsolete more and more rapidly. In other
words, to remain technically/functionally competent will require constant
updating and relearning in an organizational world that will not bear the costs
in terms of money and time for this up-dating process. Will individual career
occupants have to plan and budget for their own learning, or will private
and/or public organizations take on some of this burden because it will
ultimately be to their advantage as organizations?
We may also see an acceleration of the process of outplacing obsolete people
and replacing them with younger more up to date talent. The burden of
re-learning will then fall more and more on the individual career occupant but
as that becomes less and less feasible financially, we may see the growth of
industry consortia who will share the burden of retraining with universities.
Supplemental funds may well come from government, creating alliances between
several sectors of the society as was the case with the retraining of the
engineers from the big aerospace layoffs in the 1970's. It is easy to predict
that the organization of the future will be a knowledge based organization. It
is another matter to design such an organization and figure out how knowledge
based careers will work out in a rapidly changing technological environment.
General Managerial Competence
This anchor category continues to attract its share of career occupants who
understand what is really involved. It is also a category that is publicly
espoused because of the great rewards that are presumed to go with high level
general management jobs, but increasingly the technical/functionally anchored
person recognizes that the skill set and emotional make-up that is needed for
such jobs is fundamentally different. One must be highly motivated to exist in
the increasingly political environment, one must have analytical and financial
skills, high levels of interpersonal competence to function in teams and in
negotiations, and, most important of all, one must have the emotional make-up
to make highly consequential decisions with only partial information.
The need for general management will unquestionably increase and will be
pushed to lower levels in the organization. As work becomes more technically
complex it requires greater coordination and integration at lower and lower
levels. As we can see in today's organizations, whole layers of management are
being cut out and organizations are being flattened and re-designed around
multiple shifting project teams. Often those teams are described as
self-managed, implying that centralized controls will be reduced to fewer and
fewer functions. The skills of general management, i.e. analytical,
inter-personal, and emotional competence, will therefore be needed at lower and
lower levels. Team managers, project managers, and program managers will have
to have general management and leadership skills above and beyond their
technical understanding of the tasks at hand. Whereas in many organizations
today one does not become a general manager until one is at department or
division level, and promotion to general management implies a big status jump
on the organizational ladder, in the future those skills will have to be
present so much lower in the organization that the status of general management
will become much more variable. Managerial ladders as such may become much
fuzzier and status will be defined more by the number of skills a given manager
has than by position in a hierarchy.
General management, like leadership, may cease to be a role or a position,
and become more of a process skill that will be needed in all kinds of roles and
positions. From being a noun, it will become a verb, and the skills may come
to be distributed among the members of a group or team rather than residing in
a single individual. Everyone will be expected to become somewhat competent at
management and leadership. The career occupant with a general management
anchor will be forced to examine once again what he or she is really
after--power, glory, responsibility, accomplishment of a task, the ability to
build and manage a team, or various combinations of these.
Entrepreneurial Creativity
More and more people are drawn to the idea that they can develop their own
business and, as the world becomes more dynamic and complex, the opportunities
for individuals with this anchor will increase dramatically. The need for new
products and services deriving from information technology, bio-technology, and
as yet unknown new technologies will continue to increase. The increasing
mobility that is available in the world today will make it more and more
feasible for the entrepreneur to go to whatever part of the world is most
hospitable to his or her ideas. The dynamic complexity of industry will put a
premium on creativity, and it is creativity that is at the core of this anchor.
It is the new companies created by this group that will be the major source
of new jobs for the other anchor groups. Maintaining an economic, political, and
cultural environment that is friendly and encouraging to entrepreneurship
therefore becomes a major issue for society. For example, one can imagine that
the political issues around tax reform should be analyzed primarily from the
point of view of not destroying the economic incentive for
entrepreneurs. At the same time, business and management schools should
recognize the importance of training people for both entrepreneurship and more
autonomous careers.
Service/Dedication to a Cause
The number of people showing up with this anchor is increasing. More and
more young people as well as mid-life career occupants report that they are
feeling
the need not only to maintain an adequate income, but to do something
meaningful in a larger context. As the world becomes more conscious of large
scale problems such as the environment, the growing gap between the developed
and the underdeveloped world, the problems of race and religion, product
safety, privacy, overpopulation, and social responsibility issues around health
and welfare, new kinds of organizations and careers are being created to
address these issues. The information technology explosion has made all of the
world's problems highly visible and thus drawn the attention of the more
service oriented. The service anchor combined with the entrepreneurial anchor
is already creating new organizations devoted to recycling, to privatizing
health care and welfare, to managing the environmental problems through
products that use less energy, to waste management and so on. Such
organizations will, in turn, absorb a lot of the technologically unemployed as
well as attracting some of the best and brightest of the new generations.
Pure Challenge
There has always been a small group who defined their career in terms
of overcoming impossible odds, solving the unsolved problems, and winning out
over one's competitors. It is my impression that this group is growing in
number but it is not clear whether more people are entering the labor force
with this predisposition or whether it is an adaptation to the growing
challenges that the world is presenting to us. In any case, there will not be
a shortage of challenges to be met, so long as this group is willing to become
active learners as well since the nature of these challenges will itself evolve
rapidly with technological change.
In summary, what we have seen so far is that each of the anchor categories
still attracts a set of people, but that the working out of a given anchor can
become problematic as the world of work and organizational structure becomes
more turbulent. The main effect is that people will have to become more
self-reliant and figure out where their particular anchor best fits into the
emerging occupational structure. The ability to analyze oneself as well as the
ability to figure out what kind of job is available and how that job will
evolve become crucial skills.
The MIT 21st Century Scenarios and Career Anchors
In thinking about the 21st Century, a group of MIT researchers
concerned with organization design has developed some possible scenarios as a
way of identifying some of the primary issues that may face organizations
(Malone, Scott-Morton, et al, 1995). These scenarios are not meant to be
predictions of what will happen. Rather, they are designed to focus thinking
on some of the critical dimensions which may determine the future evolution of
organizations. A group of faculty worked for over a year identifying the
dimensions and thinking through their implications. Organizational size and
degree of centralization emerged as two such critical dimensions leading to the
following scenarios. In one scenario one can imagine the world becoming more
and more dominated by a small number of very large organizations who will
centralize a few key functions and develop broad policies toward careers and
employment that will cover very large numbers of people. Such global
organizations could then be joined as a life time proposition and one's basic
career identity would be defined by the global super-unit, but the actual
career moves would still allow for a lot of variety because the organization
would have many sub-units doing different things.
The other major scenario is that the world will increasingly break up into
smaller and more varied kinds of organizations that will constantly change
their shape, their personnel, and maybe even their missions and primary tasks.
One would join such organizations on a temporary and perhaps part-time basis
and would never define one's career in terms of any one of these organizations.
There would be no common policies regarding pay and benefits, and individuals
would manage their economic affairs themselves. Externally defined careers
would become rarer and rarer, and the need for clear internal career
definitions would become psychologically more and more important.
A third possibility is that both of the above scenarios will materialize,
that there will be a few super-organizations operating on a global scale and a
great
number of smaller organizations many of whom would operate as sub-contractors
to the large units. The individual career occupant would have to make choices
early in the career as to whether to link to the large global organizations or
move among the smaller and temporary systems that will evolve.
The large units clearly offer a new basis for career security so long as the
person is willing to maintain the skill levels needed and be willing to be
moved in response to the organization's needs. Managerial ladders will, of
necessity, continue to exist in these organizations though with many fewer
rungs. Technically/functionally anchored careerists will find broad
opportunities in such organizations but may get stuck either in jobs that do
not remain challenging or, alternatively, in jobs in which learning new skills
will be a perpetual requirement. The career occupants with entrepreneurial,
autonomy, service, pure challenge or life style anchors will find the smaller
organizational sets more receptive to the kind of work they want to do. In
each of the scenarios there are opportunities for all of anchor types, but the
sorting out and matching process will be more difficult and will require more
self-management of the career. In all three scenarios another major
implication is the need to develop more skills in analyzing and designing the
work itself. Table of Contents
Career Anchors: Some Speculations on their Evolution
Shifts in the Content and Structure of Career Anchors
Security/stability
Autonomy/independence
Life Style
Technical-functional competence
General Managerial Competence
Entrepreneurial Creativity
Service or Dedication to a Cause
Pure Challenge
The MIT 21st Century Scenarios and Career Anchors
Job/role Planning as the Key to Future Career Matching
References