Shift happens

The smallest incident can reverberate throughout a working life, writes Jim Bright.

How many factors have influenced your career direction? The list could include your genetic disposition, parents, upbringing, siblings, extended family, where you lived and where you live now.

Add to that teachers, school, friends over the years, the state of the economy, physical and mental health, the political climate and gender.

Don't forget sexual orientation, marital status, children, aged parents, fashion, religious or spiritual beliefs, technological advances, community beliefs and chance events.

In other words, your career path has been affected by a range of complex influences, all of which are changing continuously. The jobs we do are the patterns that emerge from such complex, dynamic systems.

My colleague Robert Pryor and I have developed a model for understanding modern working lives that takes into account this complexity. We call it the Chaos Theory of Careers.
 
It aims to take into account several key factors involved in career development that have typically been overlooked by other approaches.

The first of these is acknowledging complexity.

The second factor is change, which is inevitable in our careers and occurs continuously.

The third factor is chance, even the best-planned careers are continually subject to random events.

The final factor is uncertainty.

There is plenty of evidence to show the role these complex influences play in shaping our career behaviour.

Change occurs all the time, although we often overlook the slow shifts because they seem to have little practical impact from day to day.

We grow a little older every day, for example, and while this seems trivial on a day to day basis, over time it adds up to a big influence.

Instead, we tend to focus too much on the fast shifts, such as landing a better job, dealing with being sacked or working on a strategy to avoid being made redundant.

Changes in our careers aren't necessarily linear.
 
It doesn't always happen that you have an idea for a career, undertake study in that field and then land your dream job.

Instead a tiny change somewhere in the system can have an enormous impact elsewhere and vice versa.

Sometimes a single word, action or day can transform your career. It may be an unkind jibe from a boss that makes you reconsider your direction, or personal development could lead to you outgrowing a job.

There is also evidence that suggests about 80 per cent of people have experienced chance events that significantly influenced their careers.
 
Instead of pretending that chance or "shift" as we call it doesn't happen or only occurs rarely, the reality is that shift happens and we need to develop personal career strategies to capitalise.

Finally, we need to acknowledge that the uncertainty present in all lives makes predicting career paths as difficult as tracking the path of a snowflake on the side of a mountain.
 
The flake might slowly drift down the mountain or be picked up by a light wind.
 
It might move dramatically in an avalanche or it might transform into something considerably different such as water.

The chaos approach can also be applied to the financial markets.

The uncertainty we are seeing in world financial markets is already having dramatic impacts on career prospects.
 
On July 19 I wrote in this column: "It may seem crazy to be suggesting that we may be in for a downturn in the jobs market after years of hearing the rhetoric about the war for talent but at the very least there appears to be a lot of uncertainty around."

Sadly, after the recent worsening of the global financial crisis, this appears to be coming true in a variety of sectors.
 
It is an example of chaos and complexity in action.

Published: 11 October 2008