Career Anchors Participants Workbook and Self Set

by Edgar H. Schein

Developed by Edgar Schein at MIT's Sloan School of Management, the Career Anchors Participant Workbook is designed to help you 1) explore and better understand your workplace skills and competencies, career motives and values; 2) analyze your present job and possible future jobs through role and network analysis; and 3) rate yourself in relation to possible competencies and skills needed in present and future jobs. Once you have completed the Career Anchors Self-Assessment , this workbook will guide you through the next steps in analyzing and understanding your career anchor. As you work through the pages, you will gain new insight into your career values and how they relate to your past and future choices. This easy-to-use workbook includes information about career development, a more complete description of the eight career anchors categories, and an interview section that helps you to analyze your career history. The workbook includes directions on how to create a personal career history, either by yourself in written form or with the help of another person. A completely new section, Job/Role Analysis and Planning, enables you to relate the career anchors to your current position and future jobs by providing an explanation and instructions for creating role maps. The self-awareness created by the research-backed information and exercises in the Career Anchors Participant Workbook will help you to understand what values are most important to you, making your future job decisions easier and more valid and your future workplace happiness and success more assured.

Genres: Self Help, Reference, Business

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 21, 2006

About the author

Edgar Henry Schein is the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritus and a Professor Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Schein investigates organizational culture, process consultation, research process, career dynamics, and organization learning and change. In Career Anchors, third edition (Wiley, 2006), he shows how individuals can diagnose their own career needs and how managers can diagnose the future of jobs. His research on culture shows how national, organizational, and occupational cultures influence organizational performance (Organizational Culture and Leadership, fourth edition, 2010). In Process Consultation Revisited (1999) and Helping (2009), he analyzes how consultants work on problems in human systems and the dynamics of the helping process. Schein has written two cultural case studies—“Strategic Pragmatism: The Culture of Singapore’s Economic Development Board” (MIT Press, 1996) and “DEC is Dead; Long Live DEC” (Berett-Kohler, 2003). His Corporate Culture Survival Guide, second edition (Jossey-Bass, 2009) tells managers how to deal with culture issues in their organizations.

Schein holds a BPhil from the University of Chicago, a BA and an MA in social psychology from Stanford University, and a PhD in social psychology from Harvard University.

From:http://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/detai...

Reviews

[L. · Rating 3 out of 5]

myślałam, że kotwice to totalne korpozapychacze, ale przyjemnie się rozczarowałam. sprawdźcie je - fajnie podsumowują to, czego od pracy tak naprawdę chcecie i potrzebujecie i nieco podpowiadają, jak to osiągnąć.

[Starbubbles · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my first assignment in my job hunting boot camp. It left me feeling not so secure that I can or even could compete against experience despite my extra training and education. Maybe I should have started on the pamphlet on networking?

This book is truly meant for someone who is thinking about changing careers, or is re-entering the workforce after bing out for a while. There are value and priority questions that clearly come from a corporate and managerial point of view. It came to be no surprise when I read that the esteemed author is a manager professor. This is not meant to be a slam against him. I just mean that it was skewed towards people with those values and experiences. I can see why my dad recommended it.

It was interesting learning about managerial types, as that is not my anchor, but I would think that considering the audience of who would be reading it, more information on types closer to the lifestyle would prove helpful. What kind of benefits would best entice someone with this anchor to pick your company? More vacation time? Maternity leave? A 401k? Stock options? How important are they and would they really be enough? That information would be helpful instead of the two paragraph blurb on that these people like to balance work and family, and expect work to not only be accommodating, but flexible as well.

The ones more focused on technical and manager anchors got pages on information written about them. That isn't to say that the questions tended to lean that way too. Many discussed commitment levels to the company and climbing that ladder with only mentions of dreams about bettering society and such. Something he also neglected was people have spent their lives in jobs they hated and weren't "them." Does that mean that their anchor was never realized, or just that they were acting on another anchor, security?

The book did give me things to think about, so it was not a waste of time. Now, onto my workbook!

[Pablo María Fernández · Rating 3 out of 5]

At least in my country it is very common to use Schein’s Career Anchors test at companies, on job interviews or coaching programs in order to understand better the person interests and motivations. I’ve take this test several times: reading a book by Marcelo Elbaum that had a version of it and on a high potential program of a company I worked at are two of them. These days I’ve made some research on another classic tool like Myers-Briggs personality test (MBTI) and found out that it is not rigorous at all so was interested in checking if with Career Anchors theory happens the same. I search for this book to go straight to the roots: the creator’s booklet to see if there was a gap between Schein ideas and the current ubicuos use and which was the methodology he used to arrive to his conclusion.
The first part was very similar to the tests I took before: the questionnaire, calculating the career anchor among the eight and a general description of each of them. The second part, the peer interview, it is the most interesting. I (and many of us) only knew half of Schein's theory, the test, but the interview is the other half. He gives the exact questions you need to ask and I agree with him that it’s probably more accurate than the test. Of course the ideal is to combine the two of them.
In summary, I found the text interesting, it’s not hard to read, I understood it perfectly despite not being a native speaker (probably because it targets non specialists). The only disclaimer is that, as I suspected, there are not a lot of scientific validations on the theory (as with a lot of psychology theories, by the way): the sample size of the study is 40 and it has a huge bias being only students and from a US university.