Today is World Aids Day.
In this short (2:49) video, HIV-positive people tell hopeful stories. It’s from the Clinton Foundation, whose Prevention of Mother-To-Child Transmission (PMTCT) initiative has changed the way PMTCT programs are managed, resulting in a 40 percent drop in transmission rates across six focus countries from 2008-2010.
This entry will probably be the concluding post in my series about life-story interventions that guide career choice. My goal has been to explore tools and assessments that employ stories/narrative to assist users in discerning what they want to do (or do next) in their careers. Two came from print books. Two were online but not currently publicly available (I explored them to show possible approaches to this kind of intervention.) Only today’s featured tool is an online assessment available to the public (for $29.95, which covers a subscription that gives users a year to work on the tool). I’m sure other life-story interventions exist out there, and I’ve love to know about them. Yvette Hyater-Adams’s Transformative Narrative Portrait, about which I’ve written before, is related but deals less with career choice than with having users re-story unhelpful habits into new and thriving stories that move toward a desired vision.
Today’s concluding tool, True Path, from Turning Points, communicates 
mixed messages about its purpose. As you can see from the graphic above, True Path is marketed as a branding tool. In another place on the site, users are urged to “click the button to find your True Path.” User testimonials on the site suggest that True Path was most helpful to them in guiding them to determine what they wanted to do in life and career.
I’ve explored the components of True Path but haven’t actually entered any information for myself. As far as I can tell, the final output of the tool is simply an aggregation of all the information the user has entered, and it is up to him or her to put it all together and interpret it. A $199 premium package is available that includes a coaching session, resume versions, cover letters, a career biography, a Linked In profile, and an elevator pitch.
True Path’s components are a mix of narrative and non-narrative:
I have no doubt that True Path is an excellent tool to prepare job-seekers for networking and interviewing, as well as crafting resumes and cover letters. Finding a career path through this tool seems — at least without more guidance — like a murkier proposition, as does developing a personal brand.
One very nice feature of True Path is that users are invited during each step to ask for assistance.
Here’s one more followup on New York Times columnist David Brooks’s project to collect stories from folks older than 70, a series he’s calling “The Life Report” …
Brooks has synthesized the lessons offered by the life stories/essays he 
received:
You can read Brooks’s full elaboration on these lessons here.
A few weeks ago, I posted about New York Times columnist David Brooks’s request for stories from folks older than 70, a series he’s calling “The Life Report.”
Yesterday, Brooks summarized the responses he’s received. He also has 
been running an essay a day on his blog. Some of Brooks’s observations:
Born in the 1920s and 1930s, most of them learned work habits in an age of scarcity and then got to explore opportunities in an age of growth. Unlike later generations, many of the men went through a phase in which they did physical labor in a factory, even if later they went on to become professionals.
Many of the women were born with limited aspirations and only saw their horizons expanded with feminism. By middle age, people of both sexes were moving freely, assuming there would be a decent job wherever they settled.
Some of my correspondents were influenced by the social revolution of the ’60s.
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:
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
Chapter 1: Early Recollections
Chapter 2: Role Models
Chapter 3: Values
Chapter 4: Interests
Chapter 5: Career and Adult Life Roles
Chapter 6: Future Career Story
Chapter 7: Action 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.
Have a heaping helping of story goodies with your stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie …
Michael Margolis has been running a series this week emphasizing how 
entrepreneurs can better tell their bio stories:
Karen Dietz is offering two terrific worksheets for free download:
“Marketing lab” Hammond Hill offers an attractive, reader-friendly white paper, B2:
Building the Brand Story for Both Side of the Brain, for free download. The paper describes B2, “branding for both sides of the brain, creating brand characters and stories that appeal to the left brain (analytic) and right brain (intuitive) in us all.” B2 …
elicits a brand character that is dynamic and speaks to us, while being true to who it is. It uncovers the authentic brand character so that people connect with it on a fundamental level where both emotion and experience live to form an instant recognition.
For lifestory, journaling, and memoir folks, Marelisa Fábrega offers an amazing collection — A Plethora of Writing Prompts for Creative Writing and Journaling — 17 writing-prompt resources with examples from each.
And finally, a terrific short piece from Thaler Pekar, 3 Ways You Can Apply Narrative & Story, in which the three ways are identity, expertise, and engagement.
In between feasting, giving thanks, watching football and parades, curl up with some of these tasty resources. Happy Thanksgiving to all!
November 25 is the third annual National Day of Listening, a national holiday started by the acclaimed oral history nonprofit organization StoryCorps in 2008. It is a day when families are encouraged to give the gift of storytelling to their loved ones, leaving a legacy that’s likely to be treasured more than any gift you could purchase. It is an effort to encourage all Americans to honor a friend, a loved one, or a member of their community by interviewing them about their lives.
This year, National Day of Listening is especially emphasizing giving thanks
to teachers.
National Day of Listening participants are encouraged to record their National Day of Listening interviews, using equipment that is readily available in most homes — from cell phones to tape recorders to computers or even pen and paper. StoryCorps has created a free Do-It-Yourself interview guide with equipment recommendations and interview instructions available online.
“The idea of listening during the holiday season has clearly resonated with people across the country,” says StoryCorps founder and MacArthur “Genius” Dave Isay. “The National Day of Listening, which coincides with Black Friday, provides a meaningful alternative to holiday consumerism and proves that simply listening to one another is the least expensive and most meaningful gift we can give.”
“Life review is an important activity that hospices use with the patients and families they care for at the end of life,” says J. Donald Schumacher, NHPCO president and CEO. “So StoryCorps’ National Day of Listening is something we strongly support and we’re pleased to be a national partner.”
As part of my exploration of life-story-based career interventions, I came across an academic paper, “Analysis of an Online Career Narrative Intervention: ‘What’s My Story?'” by Lisa Severy, director of career services at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who created a narrative online intervention as part of her dissertation project. (You can find the paper, published in The Career Development Quarterly, if you have access to library databases.)
The intervention no longer exists for others to use since Severy created it just for her research. However, she tells me, a number of the intervention’s components were rolled into an assessment that is available on the Web (see graphic at bottom of this post; more about that later).
Narrative/story-based career interventions and assessments are not exactly a booming trend, but they are an emerging form that is attracting attention in the counseling community and among job-seekers. Severy noted in her 2008 paper that many more volunteers than expected signed up to participate in the online career narrative intervention, suggesting strong interest in this type of narrative career exploration.
The approach springs from constructivist career development, which, Severy writes, “assumes that individuals organize themselves and the world around them into categories based on their own experiences and refiection on those experiences. In turn, “narrative career counseling is a type of constructivist model emphasizing language, discourse, and theme development,” she writes. This approach “involves the writing and revising of a coherent personal and professional narrative through exploration, experience, and refiection. By creating personal career narratives, clients are empowered to make career transitions in accordance with the overarching, long-term career constructs, Severy continues.
Advantages include using the clients’ own language rather than relying on “norm reference, reflecting diversity of human experience.” In this way, the intervention is an idiographic approach that focuses on clients’ individual behavior and uniqueness — as opposed to nomethetic forms of assessment that look at skills, values, and traits.
In fact, nomethetic forms have been criticized as reductive in that they, as Severy notes, “reduce clients to a particular set of traits.” In contrast, “the narrative process invites clients to expand their experience, explore options, and create opportunities that fit into their changing constructs of careers.” Severy’s online system did not compare “responses of a norm group or with an established set of criteria,” nor did it use an algorithm to generate outcomes.
The other advantage of the narrative approach is that it “encourages long-term strategic transition management rather than one-time decision making that can create a cyclical pattern of quick choice followed by crisis,”
The major disadvantage is that narrative assessment/intervention requires a lot of time and effort by both counselors and clients. Severy noted a “troublesome” number of participants who did not complete the intervention, though she doesn’t specify what percentage failed to finish.
Severy’s project was designed “to help clients reflect upon their construct of career, including life themes of success, influence of others, interests, and values.” To do so, participants experienced eight online activities:
Severy compared the tool to “an online guided journal.”
Here’s how Severy described her research results:
Results indicate that participants using the online tool exhibited less career indecision and more certainty after completing the online tool and in comparison with participants who did not complete the activities.
As I mentioned, Severy’s project did not live on in its original form as something that folks can experience today; however, around the same time she was completing that project, she got involved with a company called Turning Points, and many of the activities in Severy’s system got folded into Turning Point’s online tool, True Path. As you look at the True Path screenshot below (larger version here), you can see the similarities. I have asked for the opportunity to test/review True Path but have not yet had a response; if I do, I’ll update this post or write a new one.
The first time I came across Hanna Phan’s presentation resume, or Présumé™, I admired it as terribly clever and creative but decided against writing about it because it doesn’t truly tell a story.
But the next time the Présumé™ came over my virtual transom (at right is a
slide from it), I decided to give it a second look and determined it was worth writing about because
Hanna details in her backstory that she had deployed traditional job-search methods for months without success:
I received a number of phone calls and interviews, but not a single call back. It was discouraging. I felt vulnerable and defeated but another part of me didn’t want just another job. Each time I thought of punching in and out, busying myself with status meetings, ending my day just to start all over again — well, it just made me tired.
Inspired by a Seth Godin podcast, Hanna concluded that “the problem with a resume is that it doesn’t scream, ‘This is ME! I’m creative, energetic, full of life’ etc. and there’s no visual way to express what you want to say to someone through a piece of paper.”
Instead, she decided to “explore other ways to tell my story — the story of why I wanted to work for a certain company.”
That company turned out to be SlideRocket, whose own product she deftly used to craft a “love letter” to the company. She tweeted the address for the slideshow to SlideRocket CEO Chuck Dietrich, who immediately wanted to interview her. Ultimately, she was hired as a product manager.
My analysis of Hanna’s Présumé™ is that it indeed does a great job of providing a glimpse into her personality — that she is, in fact, “creative, energetic, full of life etc.” She also does a superb job of describing why she wants to work for SlideRocket. In neither case, in my opinion, does the presentation reach the level of story, but it does offer story elements, especially the element of character.
Dietrich didn’t cite Hanna’s story as what inspired him to interview her, though he noted that her presume told him a lot about her. “While the way Hanna reached out to me certainly got my attention,” he wrote to me in response to my question about the biggest single factor in consider her for employment, “what sealed the deal was her creative use of SlideRocket to show not only that she was passionate and hungry for the job, but that she had the skillset and entrepreneurial spirit to be successful in the role. Just as a picture is worth 1,000 words, her Présumé was worth an entire interview. It brought so many facets of her as an individual to life in a way that typed words on a page simply could not.”
SlideRocket offers its own slideshow introducing the Présumé™ concept.
SlideRocket’s Présumé™ section offers three Présumé™ templates as a starting place for job-seekers.
Presume has free and premium levels of service, as well as a free 14-day trial in which premium features are offered.
I would love to see some job-seekers truly use the presume as a story vehicle. Hanna perhaps didn’t need to go full throttle with telling her story because she effectively demonstrated her passion for her prospective employer’s product by using that product effectively. For others, story may be the element that engages their next employer.
Career columnist Liz Ryan, long a supporter of storytelling in the job search, has included storytelling on a list of five new skills job-seekers need:
“I have a strong work ethic and get along with all kinds of people” is
about as compelling as “I had cereal for breakfast” — but, worse, it’s not even believable. Anyone can claim these characteristics, and nearly everyone does. To get a hiring manager’s attention, tell a brief and powerful story that demonstrates what you get done when you work: “When our big Q4 product release was delayed a month, I put together an outbound-calling campaign that kept our accounts from bailing and got us $450,000 in preorders” will let a hiring manager know some of the good things that happen when you showed up, saw, and conquered.
Oh yes, so much more engaging and credible.