A few months ago, graduate student Joseph Palmisano asked me to be a subject-matter expert for his master’s-degree project, an online, narrative-based career tool.
In fact, it has been my involvement with Joseph’s project that has inspired 
this current series. He turned me on to Lisa Severy, whose similar project I profiled in the previous segment of the series.
Like Severy’s Joseph’s tool is beginning its life as a project as opposed to an actual product the public can use. While Severy’s didn’t survive after her research ended (though many aspects were rolled into the True Path assessment on the site Turning Points), Joseph hopes to approach his employer, a publisher, about turning it into a product. He has given me permission to write about the project.
Like Severy’s project and virtually any narrative-based career assessment, Joseph’s project is “designed to take a constructivist approach to career assessment, whereby:
- Subjective life and work experiences and feelings are viewed as a whole within a lifelong development framework.
- An individual is guided to author a meaningful future career story that is integrated with life themes and a preferred way of being.
- The expected outcome is client-driven change based on a deeper understanding of self-identity and growing complexity of the world of work.”
The steps, or “chapters” in Joseph’s version, which he has named “Constructing a Life that Works,” taken from the title of a research paper on narrative career consulting by Campbell and Ungar. His target audience is mid-career changers, who “will write a future career story integrated with the other aspects of their lives in collaboration with a career counselor.” I can’t be absolutely sure, having not seen Severy’s project, but my impression is that Joseph’s model places greater emphasis on working through the chapters with a counselor.
The seven chapter story exercises cover the following tasks. In each chapter, “Collaborating with the career counselor” consists of emailing a self-assessment to counselor and reflecting on feedback and guidance:
Self-Assessment
- Describing career indecision and reasons
- Collaborating with career counselor
Chapter 1: Early Recollections
- Writing about childhood memories
- Identifying life themes
- Collaborating with career counselor
- Elaborating on chapter story and life themes
Chapter 2: Role Models
- Writing about role models
- Identifying life themes
- Connecting themes of chapter stories
- Collaborating with career counselor
- Elaborating on chapter story and life themes
Chapter 3: Values
- Identifying values
- Identifying life themes
- Connecting themes of chapter stories
- Collaborating with career counselor
- Elaborating on chapter story and life themes
Chapter 4: Interests
- Writing about interests (work, hobbies, other activities)
- Identifying life themes
- Connecting themes of chapter stories
- Collaborating with career counselor
- Elaborating on chapter story and life themes
Chapter 5: Career and Adult Life Roles
- Writing about work and adult life-role experiences
- Identifying life themes
- Connecting themes of chapter stories
- Collaborating with career counselor
- Elaborating on chapter story and life themes patterns
Chapter 6: Future Career Story
- Combining chapters into future story
- Using Web-based sources on the world of work
- Collaborating with career counselor
- Elaborating on future career story
Chapter 7: Action Plan
- Drafting action steps and timeframe
- Documenting potential barriers, solutions, and compromises
- Identifying support resources
- Collaborating with career counselor
- Finalizing plan
I note two especially interesting aspects to the tool. In the “Early Recollections” chapter, Joseph talks about the concept of “preoccupation:”
Some early memories made a greater emotional impression than others, due to your sensitivity to them. These memories became a preoccupation or struggle that you, often subconsciously, continue to relive and attempt to turn into motivation and strength. With repetition, you will hopefully take another step towards mastery.
It seemed to me that a user would need some guidance about which early recollections to focus on as it’s hard to imagine that just any recollection is relevant to this “preoccupation” and themes that inform one’s career. Asked my earliest recollection, for example, I always cite the time my sister, age 1, picked up a honeybee and handed it to me (age 3), whereupon, the bee stung me. It’s hard to see preoccupation and career themes in that memory.
Joseph takes his cue from Mark Savickas, a pioneer in narrative career counseling. “Savickas suggests,” Joseph says, “that the client will share what s/he believes are significant memories, which will result in identifying their preoccupation.” Maybe I just don’t remember enough about my childhood (one of the hazards of being as old as I am).
The other interesting piece is Joseph’s approach of integrating a nomothetic assessment into an otherwise idiographic one; in a chapter that encompasses elaborating on life-career themes, Joseph has the career counselor determine the client’s RIASEC type based on the client’s writings. RIASEC is an acronym for the career-related personality types developed by psychologist John L. Holland. The letters in RIASEC stand for:
Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional. The client takes his or her RIASEC type into consideration in drafting his or her Success Formula. Typically, RIASEC would be derived from a multiple-choice-type assessment. I’m rather fascinated that counselors could derive the type from the client’s narrative instead. I’m also slightly uneasy that the narrative doesn’t stand on its own in Joseph’s approach, and the more reductive RIASEC approach is introduced. Combining the approaches, however, is novel, and I’ll be interested to see how it plays out.