What do I need from my Career: Career Leader approach
Class Connection: Value Focused Thinking
After receiving my admission offer from Goizueta, I soon received my first assignment. Go to CareerBuilder (http://www.careerbuilder.com) website and take the tests. In a matter of few hours, the online application spitted out a few career alternatives for me.
The survey was very unique in the sense that it did not start with the alternatives but by asking what I was looking for in my career and what skill sets I believed I had. This is a classic example of value based thinking over alternative based thinking. When in India, our parents (I should say that a large proportion of current/past generation) had only three alternatives for their children’s future. If male, 1) get into family business (if any) 2) become a doctor (anything) 3) become an engineer (mechanical, electrical and more recently computer science). If female, replace the first and third option with ‘get married’. Once the alternatives were decided, logical justification of the choices were made that included everything from social status to affluence to foreign trips.
Coming to US (more recently Goizueta) and going through the CareerBuilder exercise, opened before me a new way of assessing and deciding careers. I had to take three tests that would answer one fundamental question – “What will my ideal career choice be?” The career builder site had the following tests:
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BCII (Business Career Interest Inventory): To discover what my interests in business work are. In other words, help me define my fundamental objectives.
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MPRP (Management and Professional Rewards Profile): To help me prioritize what really is motivating to me in work. Alternatively said, what makes my fundamental objectives fundamental?
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MPAP (Management and Professional Abilities): To help me identify my top abilities in business work.
After finishing my tests, the application provided me a detailed report at the beginning of which were listed my top career choices (what should be and not what I intended it to be). Following that were detailed explanations and reasoning behind the choices (alternatives) provided. Thus, we moved not from “alternatives” to “goals” but from “what are the goals” to “what alternatives I have” or “what alternatives I should explore”.
What did Career Leader tell me to be? Well, that discussion is for another day.
