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Career Values Sample Report Your careerVALUES Report - Your Personal Values - Using your Values
„ current job match „ gap analysis „ create your future job brief „ career decision guide „ minimising gaps in career values and current work „ value enhancement Summary You have taken the first step in clarifying your values and increasing your chances of aligning your work with your values. However, this process is an ongoing one and is highly individual. It takes time, energy and reflection. Following you will find a matrix highlighting your values from most preferred through to those least preferred. All will have relevance for your future career. You have effectively prioritised those things that are most important to you in your work and in your life. But, the process should not finish here. We have also included some worksheets and activities that will enable you to further clarify your values in the future. Values can be seen as a sensitivity and awareness to ongoing choices that we have every day, to either live up to and enhance our values, or to move further from them. These continual choices can strengthen our values. Career values
Your personal values
Using your careerVALUES Core values are fundamental beliefs that are well-developed and have probably been part of your character for years. When you do something that contradicts these values, your intuition, or gut feeling, will serve as a reminder that something isn’t right. Unarticulated or undefined values can leave us feeling rootless. We drift without an anchor and often question our self-worth. When people are unaware of their personal values – and the vast majority are – we can find ourselves playing roles and constantly trying to meet the expectations of others. Synergy and flow are two words that describe any process moving effortlessly forwards. When your work, life activities and goals are in synch with your core values, there is no internal conflict holding you back – this creates an energy surge that can effortlessly lead you towards greater success and goal accomplishment. If we ignore what is truly important to us – we ignore our greatest source of power. When we fill our lives with activities and attitudes that are congruent with our values, we gain considerable satisfaction and can achieve great things (all by our own definition of success of course). What next? It is all very well, having clarified your values, it is how you use this information from here, which will impact on your career and life satisfaction. It is how you integrate these values into your daily working and personal life which will add significantly to your personal satisfaction. We have therefore created a series of Worksheets using your careerVALUES which you can use to make steps to immediately improve your working life. Worksheet 1: Current Job Match In the worksheet below, you will find your most important values appearing in the left hand column. We would now like you to evaluate to what extent those values are being met in your current work. In other words, if you have Expertise as a top value, is this something which you are able to use or extend in your current role? Another example could be the value “location”: if this was important to you we would now like you to assess whether your current job meets your requirements in relation to location. Please use the following rating scale: Completely satisfied 2 Moderately satisfied 1 Not satisfied 0
Worksheet 2: Minimising the gap In the following worksheet you will find a list of the careerVALUES that are not being met or fulfilled in your current working life. It is important that you now begin to take some actions to ‘plug’ these gap areas. If these are values which are truly important to you, they need to play a part in your life, if not at work, in your personal life, and if not now, sometime in the for-seeable future. Use the following worksheets to identify what actions you can take to ‘close the gap’ in any of the areas you have identified of importance to you.
For Example
Don’t worry, if you have a few gap areas, it may not be all that surprising as we tend to most conscious of those things that are missing or that we want to improve upon, rather than appreciating the values that are already being met in our work and/or lives.
Worksheet 3 Future Job Brief The next step in closing the gap on your careerVALUES is to develop a future job brief using your career values. This is very simple to do and just requires you to put into words exactly what it is you are looking for in your future career. For example, if you had the following three top career values your future job brief may include the following descriptions An example:
We have created a worksheet for you to print off adding your own key specifications of what should be included in your ideal future working life. Looking toward the future, using your values as a starting point identify some of the things that you would like in your working life in the future.
It pays to take the time for this, you may well take forgranted that you know exactly what you are looking for, but it will be unique to you. I was recently working with a workshop of 12 people all in the same role. What surprised me and them immensely was that they were fulfilling uniquely different values through their work, although they all had the same job title and working conditions. Taking the time to articulate what you are looking for and what is important to you, increases your chance of finding it, and also allows you to express more clearly to others what you are looking for.
Worksheet 4: Career Decision-making Your careerValues can be a very useful and unique way of approaching career decision-making. Instead of the usual working out of pro’s and con’s when comparing options such as “Should I stay or should I leave?” type questions. We suggest that you evaluate options against your own values, which are effectively your set of criteria for the perfect job. For Example: Carer Decision: To stay self-employed vs obtaining a paid position.
On the following worksheet you will find your top 12 values and two columns to evaluate your options. You may need to print and create more columns if you are comparing more than two options.
Worksheet 5 : Getting balanced / focusing on your top priorities What are the top five personal priorities in your life? What are your five most important personal responsibilities? If sufficient time and energy have been allocated for these priorities, you probably sense a degree of balance. There is a sense of being in control. If, on the other hand, these priorities are pushed on the back burner, it is quite likely you are experiencing a feeling of dissatisfaction or frustration. Making the move from one who is busy all day to one who makes a difference involves an evaluation of current activity. Worksheet 5 asks you to evaluate how much time you have given to each of these priority values in the past five months. Are the hours and days adding up to the quality of life you desire? For Example: Approximate percentage of working time spent consistent with your identified value
If sufficient time and energy have been given to your priority values, you probably sense a degree of balance. There is a sense of being in control. If, on the other hand, these priorities are not given much time, it is quite likely you are experiencing a feeling of dissatisfaction or frustration. We are not suggesting a prioritisation of your immediate day-to-day activities, rather based on your values, you need to determine your real priorities and schedule them into your weekly calendar. Most of us have little difficulty listing our priorities. Where we struggle is making time for them. We have good intentions. We make huge efforts for short periods of time, maybe even three weeks or a month, but then we tend to fall back into the habit of allowing others and our calendars to dictate our priorities, and soon our life is once more out of balance. Donald Rumsfield suggested “Control your own time. Don’t let it be done for you. If you are working on the in-box that is fed you, you are probably working on the priority of others”. Put into action today a plan that will allow you to choose how the precious gift of time will be spent.
In our fast paced world it is easy to get caught up in a flurry of activity. Observe people around you. Some are rushing everywhere, attending meetings, trying to concentrate on multiple priorities and projects, writing reports, eating on the run and accomplishing very little. The world doesn’t care how busy we are. The world doesn’t reward you for your intentions, or the dreams you hope to pursue. What’s important is what you have actually done, your results. Or as JohannWolfgang Von Goethe put it:
“Things that matter most should never be at the mercy of things that matter least”.
worksheet 6 value enhancement
Taking time to clarify our values is one of the most critical things we can do. Our careerVALUES make a contribution to our motivation for certain jobs and work roles. We also know that most people would like to find work that improves their skills, stretches their abilities and allows them to accomplish tasks competently. In general they also seek an element of self determination in their work. They want to be able to have a say in how things are done and to make significant contribution to their organisations. But another important part of the motivation equation is an individual’s desire for a preferred work environment or a particular type of organisation. These preferences are usually the result of personal values and can be an important aspect of career motivation. They influence how we feel about different types of work and different types of organisation. The more congruence there is between your values and motives and those of the organisation, the more satisfaction you are likely to experience. However, values do sometimes change with time and unlike personality and interests, can change dramatically. They affect different people in different ways, so it’s for you to decide how important your values are. You might feel so strongly about your values that they help you limit the choices that you have. For instance, you might want to exercise creative values over and above anything else and so narrow your choices to areas you feel would be most in line with these values. Some people are able to put their values to one side temporarily in order to get the sort of training they need, e.g. delaying having work which is Morally Fulfilling such as working for a charity, until fully trained in accountancy and finance with large blue chip organisation, thus being better able to make a useful contribution in the long run. If we ignore what is truly important to us – we ignore our greatest source of power. When we fill our lives with activities and attitudes that are congruent with our values, we gain considerable satisfaction and can achieve great things (all by your own definition of success of course). |
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