Career Choices: Are You Making Conscious Decisions?

Most likely, the best option here will be option B. The corporation will not suit your friend because work there will affect their lifestyle (and it is important for them to preserve it). A small family studio can be a good place, but only if your friend's contribution to the common cause is evaluated separately.

Our values and motives determine the choice of profession and career path. They can change over time as we gain experience. If we do not focus on them, it brings us discomfort (for example, a successful specialist who has reached a managerial position suddenly finds himself unhappy).

It is important for someone to help people, someone feels comfortable in a team, someone values independence and personal recognition, someone feels that they are not living their life in vain only when they share their knowledge with others.

Some values are obvious to us and lie on the surface, while others are hidden and require work to be recognized.

The more correct answer is B. Apparently, Jama never chased stability and status. His main motivation is to become better as a specialist, to gain expertise. This is an expert career type.

The linear, or classical, career type implies the usual movement up the career ladder from artist to art director.

A spiral career is a movement through related positions and spheres due to the expansion of the range of competencies.

Which of these three career types is closest to you?

The interesting thing about this question is that there are actually no wrong answers here. Our hero seems to have a nomadic career type. For him, it's normal to change roles, try new things, and start from scratch in different spheres. Therefore, any of the proposed options might suit him. Yes, even working in a corporation that offers growth and development can turn out to be quite a comfortable option - at least for some time.

Plus, as we already wrote above, our values can change throughout life as we gain experience and our life strategies change. What if our hero is currently at a stage where the nomadic career type will organically switch to a linear one?

The more correct answer in this case is C. We are not dealing with a nomad who tries themselves in unrelated spheres. Our candidate's career type is portfolio, meaning mixed. A portfolio career type most often implies working for oneself in different professions and types of employment. The values here often include flexibility, diversity, and autonomy.

As long as we habitually measure success only by job title and salary level, we will continue to talk about burnout and loss of meaning for a huge number of specialists.

Success is multifaceted and means different things to different people. But if you need a formula, here is one option: success is a combination of factors such as income, health, work-life balance, good environment, development, education, love for what you do, and meaningfulness of what you do. Therefore, people make career decisions differently: depending on what is important to them here and now.