How to choose your career: Interview with Dr. Bryan Dik
In 2018, I published a book about how to choose your career. In 2024, I moved the content to this site. Below is the interview with Dr. Bryan Dik.
Your book discusses the concept of “calling.” Can you please explain what that means?
The term “calling” means different things to different people, so on the one hand, there isn’t an answer to that question to which everyone will agree. One useful distinction was made by Stuart Bunderson and Jeff Thompson, both management professors, who differentiated between the classical and neoclassical view and the modern view of “calling.”
The classical view has a long history with deep religious roots. The idea that any type of job can have spiritual significance dates back to the Protestant Reformers such as Luther and Calvin, and the Puritans after them. In this view, the word “calling” implied the presence of a “caller,” who was traditionally understood to be God. God issues a summons to which people respond. This brings a person a strong sense of meaning and purpose. Furthermore, in this view, the calling isn’t strictly focused on the well-being of the individual, but rather on how one’s work contributes to the common good. The neoclassical view retains this sense of a transcendent summons to do personally meaningful work toward “other-oriented” ends, but applies the concept more broadly, beyond any single religious tradition.
The modern view, by contrast, focuses on an inner drive for self-fulfillment. There is overlap in that the modern view also includes a sense of work as very meaningful and purpose driven, yet the modern view describes a calling as emerging from within, rather than in response to an external caller, toward the goal of individual happiness rather than social contribution.
When I talk about calling, I mean the neoclassical view, because I believe this perspective is more faithful to the literal meaning of the word “calling” and to how the word has been used historically.
Many Americans are discouraged because they hear that if they have a job at all, they should feel lucky, implying that a search for career fulfillment is a luxury and not possible in a tough economy. What is your response to that?
It is usually in poor taste to tell people how they “should” feel, so I bristle against that, although I know doing so is common. There is something to be said for striving to be content and recognizing that we are operating in a very difficult economic climate. Most people who assume they will have an unconstrained career choice process, where they can simply do what they love and expect the money to follow, will get a big dose of reality fairly quickly. However, I don’t think “choice” is impossible today as people look for work or strive to make their work meaningful, either. Some people clearly have more choice than others for a wide variety of reasons; there is no denying this. Nevertheless, I suspect that most people underestimate how much latitude that they have.
Lately, I’ve been paying close attention to what a few scholars in management have been saying about what it takes to find a deeper sense of meaning and purpose within one’s existing job. Three researchers who focus on this are Amy Wrzesniewski at Yale, Jane Dutton at the University of Michigan, and Justin Berg at the University of Pennsylvania. They have developed ideas about “job crafting” that I hope will catch on in vocational psychology. Job crafting starts with the notion that one’s job isn’t fixed. It isn’t static. People can actively do things to change their experience of their work — their tasks, their relationships, and their beliefs about what their work is ultimately all about at the end of the day.
The notion of job crafting isn’t without precedent, of course. In their Theory of Work Adjustment, René V. Dawis and Lloyd H. Lofquist postulated an adjustment model that included both active and reactive adjustment styles. These styles are essentially job-crafting strategies that focus on shaping either one’s work environment, one’s self, or both, so as to improve and maintain the level of fit between the person and the environment. Same principle: You can take your existing job and make it a better fit than it is currently.
It is a harsh reality that there are less abundant options in the job market right now than there have been in other points in time. I wouldn’t want to discourage people from exploring what is out there. But I also want to recognize that people can actively shape their experience of their current job in ways that might make it more in line with what they hope to experience from their job.
Suppose someone is struggling with career indecision because no career seems like a good fit. What would you suggest that person do to get unstuck?
If someone says that nothing is a good fit, they might not be looking at the full scope of opportunities that are out there. Many people have only explored a narrow range of choices, perhaps because they were exposed to a fairly narrow range of occupations as they were growing up. Try this: Think about your parents, and write out what kinds of work your parents’ friends did for a living.
When some people do this, they list a lot of things because their parents ran with a pretty eclectic group, but for others, the range is extremely narrow. I am still kind of old school when it comes to my approach to addressing this kind of concern. I would probably start by administering an interest inventory like the Strong Interest Inventory. I would look at high scores on the Strong’s Occupational Scales, paying careful attention to the person’s pattern of interests that suggest similarity to certain people who are happily employed.
I would ask the person to go home with an assignment to look at scores that are mid-range and higher and to make a list of possibilities based on what they see there. This is just a first step, so I always encourage the person to be very liberal in creating this list — don’t rule anything out yet; if it looks at all interesting to you, add it to the list. Of course, the Strong Occupational Scales currently list 122 different occupations. That’s a lot, but the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) has about 10 times more, so I also encourage clients to look at O*NET OnLine. Then we talk about their list. Often, when people do this exercise, they find themselves gravitating toward a few distinct possibilities, and those occupations become special targets of attention as we move forward in our work together.
I should note that some people have very flat profiles. The key question when that is the case is whether the overall profile is elevated or depressed. If someone has a flat profile, but all the scores are high, that person probably has very broad interests and may struggle because it’s hard to choose just one thing, if doing so means NOT choosing the many other things that she or he finds really exciting.
That’s usually a better problem to have than when scores are uniformly low. If someone doesn’t have any high scores, she or he might have very narrow interests. The person might like just one specific thing, and say “dislike” to everything else. Or that person might be depressed and is viewing everything through a dark lens and can’t get excited about anything. When a person feels stuck because of something like that, then it often makes sense to work on the depression before cycling back to look at the career choice question when they are in a different place emotionally.
Based on your research and experience, what are the biggest variables in determining job satisfaction?
Research points to a half-dozen key factors. Barbara A. Fritzsche identified six key factors in a review chapter she wrote in Career Development and Counseling: Putting Theory and Practice to Work:
1. Comparisons to prior job experiences and what other jobs you think you could have;
2. Social context — it makes a difference whether you work with people who hate what they are doing and are miserable vs. people who enjoy what they are doing;
3. Characteristics of the job — the extent to which you can use your skills and strengths, and whether the tasks for which you are responsible seem meaningful and result in a tangible outcome that matters to you, along with the extent to which you are personally responsible for the work produced;
4. Job stressors — constant turnover or unclear expectations are stressful, and it is hard to maintain satisfaction in an environment like that, especially when there are high demands but low personal control;
5. Personal dispositions — some people are genetically more sunny in their disposition and tend to be more satisfied as a result; and
6. Person-environment fit — how well does the person’s unique constellation of gifts fit with the job requirements that she or he faces day in and day out? If people are using their strengths and their needs are met, they are more likely to be satisfied.
One last thing I would add to this is the work of Arthur Brief, a management professor who takes an integrative approach to job satisfaction. He combines dispositional and situational approaches.
People do differ in their chronic or dispositional levels of happiness or unhappiness, but clearly, situations are also different.
Some jobs provide a lot more reasons to be satisfied than others. The dispositional component and the situational component interact in this way: The same situation, if it is a bad situation, will not be as bad for someone with a sunny disposition than for someone with a darker, more brooding disposition. But that isn’t to say that the person with the sunny disposition wouldn’t be even happier in a better job situation. Your disposition influences how you interpret the situation that you are in.
Much of your work explores the role of religion and spirituality in career development. Can you summarize how religious or spiritual beliefs affect career decision-making and workplace satisfaction?
A theologian would answer this question differently than a psychologist, but I think the perspectives of each can be complementary rather than competing. I’m a psychologist, though, so I am going to focus on that perspective.
Clearly, the way religious or spiritual orientation affects career decision-making depends on the individual. It’s likely that many psychologists don’t do well with this type of question, though. Think about the numbers:
In the United States, surveys repeatedly show that between 92% and 95% of people say they believe in God or a universal force. Around 40% say they attend weekly worship services, and some 67% say religion is very important to them.
By contrast, psychologists are consistently ranked the least religious group of all those in the sciences. Many times there is a mismatch between psychologist and client. Many psychologists are not comfortable talking about religious beliefs and many clients aren’t sure it is safe to talk about it in the room. This scenario is problematic, maybe even damaging, because it reinforces a client’s feeling that they have to compartmentalize their religious beliefs from their career decision-making. To be sure, some people are perfectly fine with this compartmentalization, but many others want an integrative, more holistic approach, but just don’t know exactly what that looks like.
An integrative approach in a counseling environment is very helpful, where it is OK to talk about religion and/or spirituality. We can ask, “What does it mean to be a person of faith and what does your faith perspective mean for what work you will pursue, and how you will strive to do it, in so many hours of your life?”
If a client is devoutly religious or spiritual, it doesn’t mean that the person needs to feel that taking faith seriously means pursuing an overtly religious career such as being a pastor or missionary. The question is how to integrate these beliefs with work, to explore the intersection between a faith perspective and work. The onus is on the counselor, not to have all the answers, but to help the client explore, utilize available resources, and approach the decision-making process in a way that honors the client’s worldview.
Some career counselors seem to focus on assessment and introspection as a way to make career decisions, and others seem to advocate an experiential trial-and-error approach to determining the best fit. What do you recommend to clients trying to choose a strategy for career decision-making?
As I said before, I’m pretty old school on this (and proudly so). I did my graduate work at the University of Minnesota, known for its “Dust Bowl empiricism,” where people seriously said things like “If something exists in nature, it can be measured” and “If two things exist, they can be correlated.” Or even: “The Minneapolis skyline approximates a normal curve.”
To me, the purpose of career counseling is to help people build a satisfying life, as John Krumboltz likes to say. To equip them to do that, you have to give them tools. A basic truism, one very well supported by research in applied psychology, is that people are different and those differences matter. We can help people understand how they are different from other people, how they are unique, and what difference those differences make in helping them to make decisions about their careers. If we have tools that are available and we know those tools have strong evidence of reliability and validity, and we feel confident that scores on the instrument do predict satisfying employment, it is really important to use those tools as a source of information to help the person make an informed choice.
No test tells a person what she or he should do, but if an assessment is a good assessment, the results are a valuable source of information. There are tools that just plain aren’t good, but when you are talking about the good assessments, those with strong evidence of reliability and validity, we use them because it helps make the process more efficient and effective for people.
You can also get very insightful information from volunteering, job shadowing, or actually trying a job, so I don’t discourage those things, but it is awfully inefficient for a primary strategy to be trying different things until you find the right one. That can be chaotic and haphazard, and there are sophisticated tools that certainly aren’t perfect, but can be very valuable when used appropriately.
If you advocate career assessment, which instruments do you recommend?
I can tell you the assessment tools that we use at the Career Assessment and Counseling Clinic at Colorado State University. Our services are affordable and we see people in the community on a sliding fee scale basis.
We assess interests, personality, values, and abilities. Abilities aren’t often assessed because it is very difficult and time intensive to do well. Counselors often use estimated abilities, but we know from research that estimated abilities and actual abilities aren’t highly correlated.
For abilities, we use the O*NET Ability Profiler. It takes two and a half hours to administer, and it isn’t necessarily the most pleasant experience for clients, but they know going in that the information will be useful for making informed decisions.
To assess personality, I am more of a proponent of the trait approach rather than the type approach, so we use the California Psychological Inventory.
To assess career interests, we use the Strong Interest Inventory (SII). To assess values, we use the Minnesota Importance Questionnaire (MIQ). The MIQ is not norm-referenced; it doesn’t compare your scores to other people, but take a forced-choice approach with ipsative scores. “Ipsative” means that it tells you what your high and low scores are relative to yourself — you may want everything in a job, but since the job that offers everything probably doesn’t exist, ipsative scores tell you what is most important to you. It tells you what is non-negotiable.
Our assessment battery starts with an orientation and intake session. Then we take three hours for testing on site and there is more testing that people can do online. There are four to five hours of testing. Then we have four sessions after that for interpretation.
The research suggests that online career assessment can be useful, but that human interaction makes a huge difference compared to batteries that are exclusively online. Having said that, online assessment systems are becoming more innovative. I have been part of a team working on an online assessment system called jobZology TM that aspires to match people directly to organizations with open jobs based on the extent to which their profiles match. We hope to provide consultation with counselors via phone or video. I think technology will play an increasing, not decreasing, role in how people seek career help in the future, and it’s very exciting to be on the leading edge of that.
Americans seem to struggle a lot with career decision-making, and Millennials and Gen Z most of all. Why do you think so many young people have such difficulty choosing and implementing career plans, and what career advice do you have for college students who are still at the launching phase of their careers?
Largely, there’s a cultural issue. Americans have a very open-ended process. There are other countries that funnel people into tracks in middle school, for example, and this is seen as the way things are done there, without too much questioning. In the United States, people can explore; they can take a broad range of classes. On the one hand, this is great because the weight of the evidence suggests that interests and personality don’t really stabilize until early adulthood anyway, so there is a lot of opportunity for relatively unconstrained exploration. Sometimes choosing too soon can be problematic; young people can foreclose their options by focusing very narrowly on one path, and then are left without a sense of what to do when if that path doesn’t work out, for whatever reason. But the downside is that so much choice can be overwhelming and paralyzing for people. It can be hard to know what pathway to latch onto.
The American value myth is that whatever you dream, you can achieve with hard work and persistence. There is plenty of evidence that this is overstated because a lot of people do face constraints, sometimes due to very severe poverty, for example. Yet people tend to internalize the “you can do anything” myth and so feel that everything is wide open, which contributes to overwhelm and decision-making paralysis.
Millennials and Gen Z often have a sense of anxiety about “What if I get it wrong?” Sometimes they approach dating relationships like this, too. They have the concept of a soul-mate, that if you don’t find this one person who will complete you, you are doomed to a life of misery and loneliness. They might take the same approach to choosing a career, with so many worrying about getting it right or they will be doomed.
They want the test that tells them what they “should” do — but as I said before, this test doesn’t exist.
I encourage people to recognize that there is usually no single right choice. We know from research that person-environment fit predicts career choice and job satisfaction, and that even though people are different and differences matter, there is a cluster of career paths that can result in satisfaction if a person chooses any one of those within the cluster. Understanding this flexibility frees people. It can still be hard if choosing one thing means you aren’t choosing other things that look good, too, but it is still freeing to know that there isn’t just one right choice.
It is also important to know that whatever you embark on initially is not likely to be where you end up. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data suggests that the average person has been in 11 careers by the time they are 50. This phenomenon is unlikely to change anytime soon.
It is important to stay open to learning and change. Things change. People change. The world of work changes. It isn’t the case that the initial career choice locks you in and if you get it wrong, too bad. It doesn’t work that way. Things are fluid.
You teach vocational psychology at Colorado State, and I suspect that many readers have never even heard of vocational psychology. Can you please describe what vocational psychology is and how vocational psychologists assist clients?
Vocational psychology is the psychological study of career choice and development. A lot of people haven’t heard of it because undergraduate vocational psychology courses are exceedingly rare. Unless you read broadly in the field of psychology, you aren’t likely to have encountered it.
Vocational psychology is rooted in the individual differences tradition. A lot of psychology focuses on how people are similar. For instance, people have biological mechanisms that govern how they sense and perceive. Or, people develop through predictable stages. Or people acquire language in specific ways. Vocational psychology focuses on the fact that people are different and the differences matter.
Where cognitive psychology and developmental psychology focus on similarities, vocational psychology focuses on differences. Vocational psychology has a research side and a practice side. There are some vocational psychologists who are scientists doing research with surveys or in a lab, and there are other vocational psychologists who might not be doing science themselves but they are reading and applying it.
Vocational psychologists leverage what we know from research to help people make informed choices that help them build satisfying careers and lives.
What differentiates vocational psychologists from career coaches?
I have interacted with a lot of career coaches who are very bright and interpersonally warm and probably quite skilled. If you Google “career coaching” or “career coach credentialing,” you get a bunch of results that say, “Earn six figures from home, at night.” There are master’s-level career counselors and Ph.D. psychologists who call themselves career coaches and there are also people who trained over one weekend and then they hang up a shingle and say they have a career coaching practice.
It is a little cynical to put it this way and I am sure I will offend people, but I think career coaching is a bit like herbal medicine. Some of it is helpful for some problems some of the time, but it is really hard to know what you are getting because it isn’t regulated like other types of credentialed practice.
In theory, a career coach would be a para-counselor. They can work well with people who have straightforward problems, such as résumé building and job search strategizing, etc. But they should refer to a psychologist those clients who have complex challenges that influence their mental health. But it can be tempting for career coaches to not do that and get in over their heads and not know their blind spots.
Vocational psychologists have a standardized education and credentialing and licensing system that is very rigorous. To say you are a vocational psychologist usually means you have a counseling psychology doctoral degree and years of supervised experience. With coaches, it is difficult to gauge. Some of them do very good work. However, I would refer a friend or family member to a vocational psychologist before I would refer to a coach I don’t know well.
Dr. Bryan Dik is a vocational psychologist and professor of psychology at Colorado State University. He is the co-creator of the PathwayU career assessment platform. He was also co-founder and Chief Science Officer of jobZology, the company that developed PathwayU, until its acquisition by PeopleGrove in 2023. Dr. Dik is the author of Make Your Job a Calling.
