By Lisa Taylor and Taryn Blanchard

Reflection is a powerful tool. Take Challenge Factory’s Assess Your Career Mindset survey today to reflect on your work and career.

The COVID-19 pandemic has tested us all. Our work, workplaces, and workforces have undergone both rapid and longer, drawn-out change. We’ve reacted, revised, and reflected as crisis and recovery permitted. None of us are in the same position we were before 2020.

As we approach the end of the COVID tunnel, paved as it is with the vaccine rollout, forecasts about the next wave of impact that the pandemic will have on careers are also starting to roll out:

These reports are timely and informative, and Challenge Factory is busy bringing our unique perspective to this forecasting.

When there are a significant number of headlines predicting significant turnover, as well as labour and skills shortages, leaders know it’s time to get ready for change. A deeper understanding of how Canadians think about their careers can provide the unique insight needed to design the right retention and support programs.

Let’s explore how integrating quantitative and qualitative data and asking better questions can contribute to a deeper understanding of career needs and mindsets.

Challenge Factory’s “Assess Your Career Mindset” survey findings

In 2016, Challenge Factory launched a survey that allowed Canadians to take a few minutes to reflect on their career. It asked them to consider where they are in their career at that moment in time, whether they want to make a change, how ready they might be to do so, how they might go about making a change, and what might be holding them back. It also prompted them to consider more broadly the meaning they associate with “careers” and “success.”

Between January 2016 and January 2018, 400 Canadians completed the survey. Here are some key highlights.

“Successful, but not satisfied”

One of Challenge Factory’s core principles is the power of asking better questions. Asking better questions allows us to more productively decode the world of work and understand the humans thriving and struggling in it. It equips us to consistently capture what’s happening now, as well as to consistently forecast what’s likely to come next, how we know what we should be paying attention to (and what we shouldn’t), and what’s needed to effectively support our clients.

Using one of the survey’s short answer questions as a case study, let’s explore how digging deeper into qualitative data allows us to ask critical questions that open up pathways for 1) rich insights about individuals and Canadian society, 2) further research needs and possibilities, and 3) strategic planning for individual or cultural transformation.

When survey respondents were asked to describe what the phrase “successful, but not satisfied” means to them, clear trends emerged. To begin, Canadians commonly define success as financial stability, strong job performance, professional competence, advancement, and recognition.

Canadians also commonly define dissatisfaction (in the context of their daily work or long-term career) as boredom, frustration, unhappiness, disengagement, being stuck, lack of fulfillment, lack of meaning, lack of interest, lack of contribution, and looking for more or to the future.

In answering the question this way, Canadians show an implicit belief that someone can achieve success even if they don’t also experience job or career satisfaction. In other words, they do believe that someone can be successful but not satisfied. The majority (82 percent) also define success and/or (dis)satisfaction without explicitly identifying (in their response) how these two conditions might be linked.

In contrast, consider this minority response that clearly aligns success and satisfaction:

Instead of defining success and satisfaction, this survey respondent identifies what they believe the relation between the terms/concepts to be (i.e., a disconnect or gap) in the context of the phrase.

Consider also this response:

Unlike most respondents, this individual explicitly identifies their belief that success is causally linked to satisfaction. To them, there is no true success without satisfaction. Satisfaction produces success. 

Now consider this response:

To this individual, success is delinked from satisfaction. Satisfaction might even be viewed as a risk to success, although this cannot be confirmed with the data collected. In our coaching programs, we often hear clients express concern that what will make them happy won’t provide the financial stability they need to be successful. This belief is often unfounded as we learn that clients are both unaware of possible career paths and uninformed about their own financial position and needs for security.

For all the variation we’ve been laying out, perhaps the most poignant trend that emerged from the survey data is the underlying yearning of our respondents—in their daily work, in their careers, in their lives. For some, this yearning manifests as a bold hunger. For others, it manifests as a quiet struggle. Some are carried forward on a wave of energy, while others are worn out and tired. This finding would not have emerged without the qualitative data collection and a human-centric approach to the data analysis.

The meaning of “success”

Just as the power of asking better questions shouldn’t be ignored, the power of qualitative data shouldn’t be either. The Assess Your Career Mindset survey doesn’t only give us an important snapshot of Canadians’ career mindsets—although it does very usefully do that. And the qualitative data gathered in the survey doesn’t only reveal the variation in understandings of success among our respondents. It also reveals the variation in how respondents chose to answer the question (e.g., what they stated explicitly and what they might have left implicit).

The survey also asks the question, “What questions or thoughts has this survey raised?” The answers are revealing. Canadians are hungry for opportunity to reflect in a guided way about their work and careers. Many of their fears and dreams for the future are bound up in their perception of near-term career possibilities and they welcome the opportunity to be asked bigger questions, with longer time horizons. Especially now, during the pandemic, when news cycles have us focused hour to hour or week to week, the ability to help Canadians make sense of current conditions in the context of what will come next is a critical component to Canada’s recovery.

At Challenge Factory, we work with a variety of different types of clients: government departments, academic leadership teams, corporate leadership teams, non-profit and independent public sector organizations, Veterans, older workers, and more. It would be a disservice to them to assume they all have a uniform understanding of success (in the context of career or workforce development). It would also be a disservice to ourselves to assume that our research, consulting, and training/coaching groups within Challenge Factory are all working towards the same type of success.

What is uniform, a starting point from which we can all take off, is that success in the world of work refers to a desired human outcome. Beyond that? The possibilities—and our pursuit of them—are many.

Remember:

The data story isn’t over

Challenge Factory has launched the Assess Your Career Mindset survey again (with modifications for the COVID world we’re now living in), giving Canadians a new opportunity to reflect on their careers at this moment in time. The longitudinal data produced will allow us to compare the findings and insights to those from the original survey. Have career mindsets and needs shifted over the past five years? What new trends have emerged? What can integrated quantitative and qualitative data tell us about how the pandemic is affecting plans for and approaches to career transition?

We invite you, as an individual with your own career mindset and needs, to complete the survey. Take a few minutes out of the day for yourself and self-reflection. We also invite you to share this survey with your friends, family, co-workers, or networks. The more people who complete it, the better our data and insights will be. And we absolutely look forward to sharing the findings with you.

Take the survey.