A new career plan for the new normal: why individual purpose beats the rest
Now more than ever, graduates are entering a workforce that is characterised by uncertainty, volatility, and transformation. The pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of several career paths that were, until a few months ago, considered ‘safe’ options. For graduates making career-defining decisions at a time when the ‘new normal’ is only starting to emerge, taking time to define their individual purpose can provide direction and optimism. Here is a guide to help you identify your individual purpose.
A volatile graduate landscape
Three key trends shaping the graduate landscape:
A reduced number of entry-level opportunities as struggling businesses prioritise survival, with recent reports suggesting that 25% of businesses are reducing graduate recruitment in 2020.
Continued, dramatic change in the roles and technical skills that are in high demand, increasing the need for adaptability.
Changing definitions of careers. The ‘jobs for life’ model has lost relevance as graduates face the prospect of having multiple careers during their working lives.
In a world where a certain and defined career path is now unlikely, defining your individual purpose can serve as a powerful navigational tool. Individual purpose, a person's core reason for being, provides direction by giving people a personally meaningful target to strive for, a target that transcends the noisy tasks, activities, and decisions that make up daily life. By setting a clear direction, individual purpose reframes early career decisions that are riddled with uncertainty and anxiety. The new career question becomes ‘what moves me closer to achieving my purpose?’.
Aside from acting as a navigational tool, setting an individual purpose provides wider personal wellbeing benefits. This is particularly true in times of crisis. Growing research highlights the correlation between having a sense of purpose, and increased resilience, life satisfaction and motivation, as well as increased life expectancy [1]. Taking time to define your individual purpose is therefore one of the most valuable tasks that those early in their career can do.
Defining your individual purpose
Here is a 4-step process to creating your own individual purpose:
1. Identify your core values
The first step is to identify what you value in life. Whilst there are basic values that exist universally [2], what you value most is a personal matter, and these drive your attitudes and behaviour. When making early career decisions, you want to be working in roles that align with your values. Use the diagram below as a starting point and think about the three values that are most important to you. Note these down as they form the basis of your individual purpose.
The 10 basic values that are thought to be universal across populations, adapted from Schwartz’s Basic Value Theory.
2. Identify your core strengths
Once you’ve identified your three most important values, the next step is to identify your core strengths [3]. These form the second building block of your individual purpose, describing what you’re best at and how you can add value. Use the diagram below to think about what your five core strengths are, these are characteristics that persist across time and situation [3]. As a start, think about how your friends, teachers and/or colleagues would describe you. Note your five core strengths down as the second building block of your individual purpose.
This Figure is adapted from Seligman 2011 (Authentic Happiness), showing the 24 ‘signature’ strengths that Seligman argues are present across individuals. These strengths can be built and developed, and it is argued that any individual possesses at least 5 of these as their core strengths.]
3. Focus your efforts
The third step is to identify the societal problems that hold the most personal importance to you. These form the final building block of your individual purpose. As a starting point, think about which of the world’s biggest problems you want to apply yourself to tackling throughout your career. Note down the top two or three, identifying the broader societal issues that encompass them, such as climate change or inequality.
4. Craft your individual purpose
The final step is to use your three building blocks: your values, your strengths, and the societal problems that you want to tackle, to create an individual purpose statement. This should be a sentence and be more specific than ‘I want to make a positive impact’, it should be solution-focused and forward-looking. It should succinctly explain what a successful career looks like to you, aligning your strengths, values and motivations.
As an example, Tom, one of our associates, identified his individual purpose as “to contribute to a systematic solution to the climate crisis through utilising my people-skills, and ability to learn, innovate and lead.” Once defined, your individual purpose statement acts as a navigational tool that allows you to identify where and how you can make a tangible positive impact. Whether that be working at a start-up tech company to solve the ecological crisis, or starting an art initiative as part of an educational programme in a refugee camp.
Using your purpose to navigate early career decisions
Your purpose statement acts as your personal North Star. It articulates at a high-level what a successful career looks like to you. Framing your early career decisions as initial steps that move you towards achieving your purpose should provide greater clarity. Your next move is not your final destination, it’s a stepping stone that will allow you to build and develop purpose-aligned skills, relationships and career capital. Purpose-driven decision-making minimises the choice paralysis that comes with early career decisions by providing a strong sense of direction, inducing feelings of optimism in replacement of fear.
Once you have crafted your individual purpose, your next step is to begin researching opportunities through this purpose-lens. This will provide a framework to help you identify and prioritise your next moves. As guiding questions, think about:
Which companies or organisations align with my individual purpose?
Which roles are tailored to my signature strengths?
Where are there opportunities for me to work on projects that are aligned with my purpose?
Are you doing something that could not be done otherwise? Are you making use of your unique strengths?
By compiling a database of purpose-aligned opportunities, you can begin to make decisions with confidence that you are on the right path.
Whilst the current graduate landscape is uncertain, your early career decisions do not need to be. By asking yourself ‘what moves me closer to achieving my purpose?’, you can navigate early career decisions with clarity, building resilience and adaptability along the way.
Footnotes
[1] To find out more about the original studies, see (a) Hill and Turiano., 2014 "Purpose in Life as a Predictor of Mortality Across Adulthood." Psychological Science 25.7 (2014): 1482-486. Web.and (b) Schaefer et al., 2013 "Purpose in Life Predicts Better Emotional Recovery from Negative Stimuli." PloS One 8.11: E80329. Web.
[2] To learn more about Basic Value Theory and the supporting psychological research, see Schwartz et al, 2012 ‘An Overview of Schwartz Theory of Basic Values’ Online readings in Psychology and Culture.
[3] To learn more about signature strengths and the theory behind them, read Seligman, Martin E.P. Authentic Happiness. London: Nicholas Brealey, 2011. Web
