What Keeps Our Careers From Feeling
Boring? Relighting The Fire In A Super Way
Joe Tucibat
Assistant Director For Career Development
MTSU Academic Support Center
Once we're established in a career we enjoy feeling that we've "seen it all," but we might also experience boredom because we seem to keep seeing the same things over and over, day in, day out. What can keep us energized, involved, and feeling that we're still growing? I mean, besides double shots of espresso...
Donald Super's theory of career development can help us explain why we get bored with our careers and can be used to predict what might bring life back to a well-worn career path. First let's look at the stages he sets out, and the ages typically associated with them.
Growth (birth to age 14 or 15)-- Self concept
develops in terms of abilities, needs, interests
Exploration (ages 15-24)-- Choices are narrowed,
defined, but not set in stone at this stage
Establishment (ages 25-44)-- Work experience helps us
"find our niche", characterized by trial and error
Maintenance (ages 45-64)-- Continuing effort to
improve working situation
Decline (ages 65+)-- leading to retirement, begin
thinking in terms of life after the "working life," reduce work output
What can keep us from getting bored with our careers is to think about how these stages and the tasks associated with them recur at each life phase, and then act to implement their positive changes in our lives. When we return to earlier phases, Super called the process "recycling." But each stage occurs in every life phase, although it may not be as obvious as the stages that occur "on schedule", or what we'd expect to see at certain ages. For example, the Exploration stage is most obvious in adolescence and early adulthood, but the stage of Decline occurs even during adolescence. However, instead of buying a Winnebago and making plans to travel America like a retiring adult might, the adolescent's manifestation of the Decline stage appears as more of a detaching from the identity of a child and decreasing time spent on pastimes associated with childhood. In late adulthood, Growth may take the form of exploring interests we had to set aside during early and middle adulthood, and our self concept may change as we do so. For example, I've seen a retired relative go from being a detail-obsessed airline captain (we passengers appreciate that quality in an airline captain) to a fairly laid-back person devoted to his new hobby of Celtic dancing.
The stages of Growth and Exploration that kept us so involved as we chose, trained for and began a career can help us after we begin feeling we've seen everything our career can throw at us. Let's look at the Growth stage; our self-concept goes through changes constantly. Most often we mark milestones-- the first grey hair, reaching another decade marker birthday, receiving a promotion, obtaining a degree or certification. Each milestone is often followed by our taking stock of what we've been through and how we've changed. Every time we reflect on changes in ourselves we reaffirm a changed self concept and can often approach our work in a different way, or get a different meaning from our work. For example, it can be predicted (using Erik Erikson's theory of development) that as we age we work for different reasons-- as we go from young adulthood to middle adulthood, our work rewards us with ways to help our primary relationships form or solidify, but later we become very interested in trying to find ways to "give back" through our work.
Exploration is revisited when we look for new problems to solve, or try to find new solutions to old problems in our field. We might also look into different positions in our chosen field, add a specialty, or look for new ways to apply what we do.
Using Super's theory to give us one way to look at the phenomenon of becoming bored and then re-energized in a career, we see that we should first assess who we are now. How are we different from when we first began our career? What are the implications of these changes for our working life? Does our work have a different meaning for us now than when we began it? Then we can explore ways to re-engage ourselves in our "stale" career. What problems are emerging in our field? What new opportunities exist for us within the field? Is there a specialty we'd like to add to our knowledge base? Are there solutions to old problems that could be rethought to benefit our organization? Can we try a new approach to a major task in our job?
You can read more about Super's theory in his book, A Life-Span, Life-Space Approach To Career Development. Now, isn't it about time for a nice double shot of espresso? See you at Starbucks!
Copyright 2004 Joe Tucibat