Changing Careers – Part 3: Supports and Intentions
What kinds of support do the people around us provide during the career change? How do we form the intention of changing careers?
In part 2 of this series, we looked at the different kinds of connections we have in our social networks, categorizing them as “strong” or “weak” ties depending on a variety of factors, but primarily around the intensity of a relationship (as measured by the breadth and depth of communication between two individuals). We also discussed some of the documented influences that strong and weak network connections can have on our career paths. In this post, we’ll talk in more concrete detail about the different types of support that our network connections provide to us during our career change process.
Different Kinds of Support During the Career Change Process
So one way of looking at the different kinds of support that our social networks provide us while we are deciding to change careers is in terms of “intellectual capital” – i.e. "who you know" affects "what you know". While Nahapiet and Ghoshal in their 1988 article “Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, and the Organizational Advantage”1 didn’t necessarily have career change as a primary focus of their discussion, they raised an important point that the people you have access to have different “acquired knowledge, skills, and capabilities” (245) that can be leveraged in different ways. Granovetter in his 1973 theory proposal2, as well as additional researchers (Higgins 20013; van Emmerik 20064; Castilla, Lan, and Rissing 20135) have further categorized these types of information as including both “instrumental” (sometimes called “hard capital”) or “socio-emotional” (sometimes called “soft capital”) resources.
The category of instrumental support includes the traditional types of support that we think of for career change such as information, advice, coaching, learning assistance, protection within the workplace, contacts, influence, and financing – as well as the “signals” that knowing certain people within your network gives to prospective employers. Instrumental support can include access to - and job leads in - fields that are otherwise difficult to get into (Greenberg and Fernandez 20166), but it can also include something as prosaic as providing a means to assist the career changer with things like household chores and childcare (Bröckel 20187) so that they can take the steps needed to pursue their career change.
Socio-emotional support, contains a different, less direct set of “acquired knowledge, skills, and capabilities”, including counseling, friendship, modeling roles and careers, and helping career changers develop their self-esteem and professional identity (van Emmerik 2006:25-26). In my research, I found that these skills were just as – if not more - important to the career changers I spoke to as the instrumental support that they also received from various network connections. Contrary to some of my initial assumptions, as we’ll talk about later in this series, my research found that strong and weak network contacts provided both instrumental and socio-emotional support, sometimes in novel and surprising ways.
The Intention to Change Careers
We’ve talked about some of the influences that strong and weak network ties can have on our career paths, and we’ve started to talk about the type of support these connections provide – i.e. the building blocks of this “influence” – but what about how people form the intention to change careers in the first place?
Career development theories such as Person-Environment-Correspondence (also known as the Theory of Work Adjustment) approach careers from the perspective of “job satisfaction” in terms of a match between the worker and their environment. From this perspective, the “Great Resignation” could be seen as workers realizing that organizations no longer met their needs and desires – or that their organizations were failing to adapt quickly enough to changing employee needs and desires – and therefore there was no longer “congruence” or “correspondence” between the worker and their occupational environment (Zunker 2016:248). Those workers, therefore, began to look at other jobs and even other career options that better met their needs and desires.
Other theories such as Krumboltz’s Learning Theory of Career Counseling and Social Cognitive Career Theory look at career development in terms of the “social learning” or “social conditioning” of an individual. These theories discuss the “problematic beliefs and generalizations” (Zunker 2016:35) that a worker may have picked up which may have proved to be self-limiting in terms of what career options they might otherwise consider. These theories stress that individuals are constantly learning and that both they and their workplaces are constantly changing. As individuals become more self-aware of their social learning and more aware of alternate career options available to them, they adapt to their new situational awareness and seek out new career opportunities that better fit their needs and desires.
While some individuals are indeed “proactively managing” their careers (Chiabaru, Baker, and Pitariu 20069) under a traditional model of career development, there are also career change opportunities that appear to emerge from “a random process, governed by factors outside our control — a life crisis that forces us to reprioritize, a job offer that lands in our lap when least expected” (Ibarra 2004:xi10). In terms of career development theories, these situations could be considered to fall under the “Happenstance Approach Theory” (Mitchell, Levin, and Krumboltz 199911) in which a career counselor’s job would be “to assist clients respond to conditions and events in a positive manner. In short, clients are to learn to deal with unplanned events, especially in the give-and-take of life in the 21st-century workforce” (Zunker 2016:37).
In terms of sociological research, though, we have more disparate lines of inquiry into the intentions of individuals to change careers. As noted by Muja and Appelbaum “voluntary career decisions are not entirely rational” (2012:69112) and are often spurred by unsatisfactory working conditions “such as poor management or poor communication” (2012:692) within an organization. This type of response — both rational and emotional — was clearly being exhibited during the “Great Resignation”. The global COVID-19 pandemic acted as a stress multiplier for many workers who were already experiencing an increasing trend of unpredictable schedules, long hours, fast-paced and unmanageable workloads, and inflexible, potentially unsafe working environments (Krugman 202113; Sull, Sull, and Zweig 202214). As a result, workers had greater motivation to re-examine their jobs and their career paths.
From the sociological perspective, this process of re-examining one’s career path and forming an intention to change careers is not solely an individual endeavor, as it depends not only on the individual’s attitude towards career change and plans for career progression (Chiaburu et al., 2006) but also on social pressures and advice from friends, family, supervisors, and mentors (Higgins and Kram 200115; Higgins and Thomas 200116; Dobrow and Higgins 200517; Carless and Bernath 200718; Khapova et al. 200719; Muja and Appelbaum 2012). This social aspect of career change extends beyond instrumental advice-giving into social identity development and management. “Traditional career theories advocate the importance of independent career choices […] but more recently career theories have begun to acknowledge the inevitably and value of other people’s influence” (Yates et al. 2017:8920), particularly in identity-management practices through modeling, support, family and cultural identities, life transitions, and career motivations (Yates 2017).
In my next article I’ll begin to talk about my own research, conducted via interviews and surveys, digging into real-world, practical examples of how the people around career changers – both strong and weak network ties - influenced and supported their decision-making. What’s your story? What kinds of instrumental and socio-emotional support did the people around you provide as you were changing careers? I’d love to learn how your experiences were similar and dissimilar to those of the people who were kind enough to share their stories with me for this research project.
Author’s note: I know, times being what they are, that we all likely have a lot of big concerns on our plate at the moment, of which the career transition process is perhaps not the most important thought on our minds. But (and this gives away my age a bit), like the musicians in the movie Titanic, sometimes all we can do in such moments of chaos is embrace what we love to do and share our talents and expertise with the world hoping that someone, somewhere, draws some amount of comfort from the effort. The time will come to act. In the meantime, it will be an honor to play with you all.
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