A career anchor is a combination of perceived areas of competence, motives, and values relating to professional work choices. The Career Anchors instrument is designed to help clients identify their anchors and to think about how their values relate to their career choices.
There are eight career anchors:
* Technical/Functional Competence
* General Managerial Competence
* Autonomy/Independence
* Security/Stability
* Entrepreneurial Creativity
* Service/Dedication to a Cause
* Pure Challenge
* Lifestyle
We believe that every person is concerned to some degree with each of these issues. The label career anchor indicates an area of such paramount importance to a person that he or she would not give it up. The person comes to define his or her basic self-image in terms of that concern, and it becomes an overriding issue at every stage of their career. This new edition of includes new and updated information and
- Addresses the rapidly changing world of business and includes more information on globalization, heightened competition, new technologies, greater organizational instability and uncertainty and shifting societal values, all of which influence career trajectories and career anchors.
- Includes a more detailed description and elaboration of the eight anchors.
- Offers a Role Mapping Process which helps to consider the various external demands and pressures and suggests action steps if these external demands are marked by ambiguity, overload and/or conflict.
- Contains Work Career and Family/life that includes suggestions for how the work, family, and personal patterns identified can interact (for better or worse) with each of the eight career anchors.
- Presents a new looking ahead section of the companion Workbook that begins with a comprehensive look at how the world of work is changing and what these changes may mean for each of the career anchors.
- Includes developmental activities that participants can use as next steps in their career development.
The Facilitator's Guide has been ramped up and crafted as a tool to accompany the Participant Workbook and self-assessment, with special emphasis on addressing facilitator and training needs for exploring these anchors.
About the Author: EDGAR H. SCHEIN Edgar H. Schein is Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His consulting work focuses on organizational culture, organization development, process consultation, and career dynamics, and among his past and current clients are major corporations both in the U.S. and overseas such as Digital Equipment Corporation, Ciba-Geigy, Apple, Citibank, General Foods, Procter & Gamble, ICI, Saab Combitech, Steinbergs, Alcoa, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, Exxon, Shell, AMOCO, Con Edison, and the Economic Development Board of Singapore.
Ed Schein has been a prolific researcher, writer, teacher and consultant. Besides his numerous articles in professional journals he has authored fourteen books. He has received many honors and awards for his writing and is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Academy of Management.
JOHN VAN MAANEN works within the fields of organization behavior and theory, and is an ethnographer of organizations ranging from police departments to educational institutions to a variety of business firms. In addition, he has worked with numerous public and private organizations in North America, Europe, and Asia, including BP, IBM, BMW, Siemens, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, Lafarge, Warburg Dillon Read, and the National University of Technology (Singapore).
He has taught at MIT Sloan since 1972. He was the faculty chair of the MIT Sloan Fellows Program at MIT from 1994 to 2000, and is currently faculty chair of the Organization Studies Group. Van Maanen has been a visiting professor at Yale University, University of Surrey, and, most recently, at INSEAD.
Van Maanen has published a number of books and articles in the general area of occupational and organizational sociology. Cultural descriptions figure prominently in his studies of the work worlds of patrol officers on city streets in the United States, police detectives and their guv'nors in London, fishermen in the North Atlantic, MBA students at MIT and Harvard Business School, and park operatives in the Sistine Chapel of Fakery, Disneyland. He is the author, co-author, and editor of numerous books, including Organizational Careers (Wiley, 1977), Policing: A View from the Street (with Peter Manning, Random House, l978), and Tales of the Field (University of Chicago Press, l988). His most recent books are Qualitative Studies of Organizations (Sage, 1999) and Organizational Transformations and Information Technology (with Joanne Yates, Sage, 2001).
