Ten metaphors of career

Posted on June 06, 2024 by Martin Hahn, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.

The word ‘career’ can mean a variety of things to different people and given the range of interpretations, implications and inferences that can be associated with the word, it is useful to begin by unpicking some of the key concepts. Perhaps surprisingly, the world of career practitioners has thus far failed to reach an agreed definition of the term. ‘Career’, ‘occupation’ and ‘vocation’ are sometimes used as synonyms and at other times as quite distinct concepts.

A career could cover just the time from first job to final job, or could incorporate the pre-occupation and post-occupation eras. It might also refer only to paid work, or may also encompass unpaid or voluntary employment or even work experience.

Some feel that a career incorporates a notion of progress and advancement, or perhaps confers a degree of prestige. It has been argued that the term has an innate middle-class bias, since it implies that there has been an active choice, as opposed to an almost predetermined destiny which is more often associated with less-privileged career trajectories. More recently, there has been an acceptance that a career is a subjective construct, rather than an objective reality and the idea being that if you think it is a career, then it is a career. Definitions have also become broader and some authors suggested a straightforward definition, suggesting that ‘career’ is the ‘evolving sequence of a person’s work experiences over time’. I like the all-encompassing and non-judgemental ethos of this definition, and their simple explanation that ‘everyone who works has a career’. Career theories are developed by academics to help us make sense of people’s experiences and dozens have been developed over the last few decades.

The theories come from a wide range of academic disciplines and are sparked off by different stimuli. Some theories focus on the content of careers and career decisions, and others look at processes; some are heavily influenced by psychological theories of the individual while the philosophical origins of others are more sociological. The theories do not try to explain every element of the career process, and aren’t intended to be applied to every person in every context. In one way, this piecemeal approach is quite helpful as the theories do not contradict each other. One helpful framework is to look at the range of metaphors that the theories use to explain how they conceptualise the notion of career.

1. Legacy metaphor: career as inheritance

These approaches are grounded in sociological thinking and hold that our career paths are (at least to some degree) inevitable, being a product of our family and upbringing, our genes, our geographical location or demographic factors such as our gender or ethnicity.

2. Craft metaphor: career as construction

This metaphor incorporates many of the key psychological theories that emphazise the agency of individuals and the role that they can play in determining their career paths. This metaphor encompasses the self-creation of career and the idea of career as part of an identity that helps to create a sense of self. The notion of ‘craft’ marries the ideas of functionality and creativity. Some authors have taken the idea of construction further in recent years and introduce what they term as a new ‘paradigm’, or way of understanding career paths, describing career choice as a process of ‘Life Design’, in which boundaries between life and work are blurred, and people make decisions based on a more holistic view of themselves and their futures.

3. Seasons metaphor: career as cycle

This series of theories assumes that the processes of career planning and development are different at different stages in your life. More recent theories, suggests the kaleidoscope model, focus on the idea of gender and the varied motivators that drive men and women at specific stages of their careers. Some authors conceptualize the cycle as a series of cycles, each building on the last. These theories have, however, been widely criticized for being too inflexible and invoking unhelpful stereotypes.

4. Matching metaphor: career as ‘fit’

This has been the dominant paradigm in careers for the last fifty years, since Holland came up with his RIASEC inventory of career interests. The metaphor can be explained by the idea of matching square pegs with square holes or finding people whose skills and interests match the needs and content of a job. Matching theories such as Holland’s have spawned myriad computer programs that link people’s interests, skills and values to appropriate job titles and (in theory) identify suitable occupations. But there are significant problems with this approach in that it is hard to know what individual and job characteristics should be measured. In addition, it is a static theory applied to a dynamic and fast-moving workplace, a good person’s environment fit accounts for only around 5% of job satisfaction.

5. Path metaphor: career as journey

This is perhaps the most common of the career metaphors, and it incorporates the twin notions of movement between place and time. A range of different theories conceptualize the movement in different ways. The traditional notion of a ‘career ladder’ implies a journey upwards, climbing promotion by promotion to a more senior, better-paid role with more responsibility. Some authors describes career journeys as being either ‘linear’ or ‘spiral’, and implicit in the boundaryless career. This metaphor, perhaps more than any other, has crept into common usage whenever we talk about careers: think about the notion of a career path, reaching a crossroads in your career, taking a step backwards, or finding yourself in a dead-end job.

6. Net work metaphor: career as encounters and
relationships

Careers are not pursued in isolation. The network metaphor explores ideas of career as a social or political institution. The prevalence of networking as a way to get and keep a job, or to generate business highlights the importance of relationships, and a relatively recent wave of relational career decision-making theories which are acknowledging the pivotal and inevitable role that others have in our career choices. There has been an enormous volume of work on work–family conflict, and theories which
demonstrate the importance of family life in career decisions.

7. Theatre metaphor: career as role

The organisation can be viewed as your stage with you as the central character of a play, taking on different roles as you move through the story. Notions of role models help us to better understand how to play the part, and psychological contracts as they are negotiated and re-negotiated allow the nature of the role to be clarified and to evolve. Role theory leads us
to understand concepts of role conflict and role congruity, and the idea of career scripts is based on the notion of a developing and deepening understanding of a role. There has been a focus in the recent literature on the idea of identities, highlighting that each of us has different versions of ourselves which come to the fore in different contexts. We might have a career identity which incorporates all aspects of our whole working lives, an occupational identity which has the job itself at its heart, and an organizational identity which defines us in terms of the company we work for. Other research on possible and provisional selves shows us how we play with the idea of different future roles, and ‘try them out’ to see how they feel, as a way to make our career decisions. Identity can be a very useful thing to discuss with clients.

8. Economic metaphor: career as resource

Originally a metaphor conceptualized from the perspective of the employer, this metaphor is best known in the term ‘human resources’. Within the career development arena, the concept is encapsulated in the notion of ‘career capital’, which looks at a career in terms of a bank of resources that you build up with every new experience encountered. The Intelligent Career Model suggests that individuals build up career capital through developing three kinds of knowledge: knowing-why — having a clear sense of identity and strong motivation; knowing-how — building up the knowledge, skills and expertise to do a job well; and knowing-whom — having a strong network of people to help support your career development in different ways.

9. Narrative metaphor: career as story

The value of career stories is grounded in the post-modern concept of multiple truths, which holds that there is no definitive ‘truth’ about someone’s career history. A single career history can be told from multiple different perspectives and the same incident can have quite different meanings depending on who sees it and their own take on it. Working with clients and getting them to tell their stories can be a great way to help them to focus on what is meaningful for them, and to help them to reflect productively on their history. The career story is important because it shows how individuals experience and value their own reality. Our stories about our careers are full of inconsistencies and they change between telling, but this illustrates the complexities of our careers and our responses to them, and also serves as exploration of how these stories can reveal a great deal about our current situation. Savickas has developed the ‘Career Style Interview’, which offers a framework for practitioners to use in order to help clients explore their own stories and make their own meanings from their experiences. Other researchers have also made use of this metaphor. Osland, for example, makes links between career ‘archetypes’, such as individual journeying and heroism, and ancient mythology. Nicholson and West even go so far as to suggest that careers are myths, ‘fictions about the past to help us feel good about the future’.

10. Serendipity metaphor: career as a series

of chance events

This final metaphor incorporate a number of theories which focus on the role of luck or chance in career planning. Luck plays a part in many career paths, and a number of theories put chance events at their core. Some authors encourages people to look for lucky opportunities and be ready to capitalize on fortunate coincidences. Two approaches apply chaos theory to careers, both focusing on the unexpected knock-on effects of particular events and other authors introduce the idea of positive uncertainty which aims to reframe the uncertainties of the future in a more positive light, encouraging people to embrace the inevitability of the future and find ways to turn it to their advantage by making more creative decisions.

The construct of ‘career’ is clearly complicated, and compounding the challenges of negotiating these different definitions and conceptualizations of career is the rapidly changing nature of the labor market. The opportunities and expectations within our contemporary working lives are in many ways quite different from those of our parents and grandparents and we will now move on to explore some of the main drivers for change in the current labor market.