Align Career and Graduate School Plans with Your Values

Overview

As you continue your career journey, it is important to take time to evaluate your goals and make sure that they align with your values, needs, and interests. Keep in mind that it is normal and healthy for your values and interests to change as you grow and your career evolves. After new experiences, like completing an internship or finishing a semester of difficult classes, it is a good idea to reflect on how your values were or were not aligned with those experiences. Based on those reflections, you can make more informed decisions in the next steps of your career.

Use Focus2 To Affirm Your Values

In Module 1, you used Focus2 to help you determine what your most important values are. Revisit this resource regularly to reflect on whether your past and current career decisions align with those values and whether the values you identified are still the most important to you.

Using Values to Guide Next Steps

Once you have revisited and affirmed your values, you can reflect on how your job search or next steps in your career journey align with those values. For example, if one of your major values is being near family, can you refine your search to include a broader range of job titles that are more geographically desirable? If you have values of both financial success and altruism, is one of them more important to your life right now than the other? Do you need to make decisions that favor one of those values over the other?

Consider booking an appointment with your Career Center if you need to talk through how your values align with your goals and how you can use them to continue to drive your decisions. Remember that values are not positive or negative. They are neutral.

Journal Activity

Write a little bit about your values. Reflect on one or more of these journaling prompts, and respond with 3-5 full sentences.

How do my values differ from my family of origin?
Thinking about my values, how can I craft questions to ask in an interview to determine if a company's culture aligns with my values?
What is the difference between your value to the company and your personal and professional values?
What is the difference between your dream job and the jobs you are considering? Are the differences values-based?

Factors of Job Satisfaction

When assessing whether your values align with your current or future roles, it is helpful to also consider the factors of job satisfaction. These factors all contribute to your feelings of contentment and satisfaction with a role or career. They include:

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A sense of purpose
Feeling supported
Trust in your team, manager, company
Flexibility in working hours, time off, hybrid work, etc.
Achievement of goals
Fair compensation
How much energy your work takes and how much you have left at the end of the day
Stress levels
Opportunities for learning and growth
Feelings of inclusion and belonging

These are important aspects to reflect on in your current role and to consider in your future roles. Each new experience is an opportunity to reassess and evaluate your values, goals, and job satisfaction. Your career journey is an iterative process.

Iterative Processes of Career

Explore, Build, Actualize Keep in mind that your values, needs, and wants will change over time. You will want to reflect regularly on how your career journey is going and where you need to adjust as your life also changes. If you arrive at a place where you feel your job is no longer aligned with your life and values, it is normal to start the cycle again. You can begin exploring new industries of interest, having career conversations, and seeking new experiences long after you have begun your career. Exploration can lead to innovation. Avocational interests can lead to vocational interests and vice versa.

Explore: Take Classes, Explore Industries of Interest, Identify your Values and Personality
Build: Have Career Conversations, Create Your Application Documents
Actualize: Practice Interviewing, Get Job Experiences, Re-assess Goals and Values

Tip: Connecting Skills

Consider connecting your skills to what the world or community needs. Tulane's Center for Public Service requirement is a good way to explore this.

Chaos Theory of Career

At NTC Career Services, we espouse the Chaos Theory of Career. This approach sounds scary, but it’s not! Instead of thinking about career paths as linear (you go to school, get a degree, get a job based on what you studied, get a new job in the same thing or a promotion, retire) we think about career as just one aspect of your complicated life that responds to outside influences just like any other part of your life.

So a career path actually looks more like a squiggly, up-and-down, sometimes messy path. You could get a job in something that is nothing like what you studied as an undergraduate, and then go back to that field after a friend starts a company and brings you on as a team member. You could take some time off between school and work and meet someone who offers you a job in another country that is an amazing opportunity even though you never expected to move.

There are a million things that could happen to change your career path. This is not a bad thing! Make sure that you have the skills to seize opportunities, reflect, adapt, and grow in any opportunity that comes your way!

Activity

Start to chart your own course and think about the possibilities. Use the activity below to start the planning.

Goal-Setting for Probability Planners, Possibility Planners, and Intention Seekers

Overview

Use Focus2 To Affirm Your Values​

Using Values to Guide Next Steps​