At some point in life, we are hindered from seeing what we desire. Perhaps a lack of self-confidence and motivation drives us to be lost in the path. Nevertheless, how can we overcome these barriers through guidance and predictive science?
On this week’s episode of Actions Antidote, we talk to Bryan Dik, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of jobZology. Bryan Dik shares his knowledge and the science behind finding the meaning and purpose of workplace worth for life. Bryan Dik is a vocational psychologist and professor of psychology. He focuses on career pathways and guidance among students and for everyone. He has published four books including Redeeming Work and Make Your Job a Calling. Bryan Dik is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer of jobZology which helps people discern their calling and live with purpose.
Want help in finding your own calling? Do you want one? Listen to this episode to find more!
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Finding Your Calling and Purpose of Work In Your Life with Bryan Dik
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about something that I really wish that I had when I was younger, when I was coming out of college and considering careers, which is a product that really helps us examine who we are, what really is going to make us satisfied and what’s going to make a satisfying day to day life, because, like many people in my general age range, a lot of us went to college and picked something that we’re interested in, picked something that maybe we’re good at in school but didn’t really think about this day to day and what really drives satisfaction with work, which is something that ends up being probably the first or second biggest use of time during adulthood behind sleeping and maybe something else. My guest today, Bryan Dik, is a professor of psychology at Colorado State University as well as the co-founder of a product called jobZology, which is a product that helps a lot of outgoing college students as well as other career change people examine what they really want to do and find a career path that’s going to be way more fulfilling.
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Bryan, welcome to the program.
Thank you so much for having me, Stephen. It’s a joy to be with you.
I’m always glad when people are happy to be discussing their pursuits with me on this podcast because it’s such a positive community of people in a way just talking about what we’re doing and I say this because at the time of recording, we’re in the middle of Denver Startup Week, which is another area where you see a lot of people just talking about their pursuits, talking about what really drives them and so, Bryan, what drove you to start jobZology? What were you observing that made you decide that this was worth your time, your effort, your sweat, everything else that people say?
A little context. I’m a vocational psychologist and one of my roles at the university is training our PhD students in counseling psychology to facilitate career counseling. A lot of magic happens in a career counseling relationship, it’s very powerful. But it’s also not always accessible for lots of people. And so one of the motivations behind starting jobZology was thinking about ways to democratize the career assessment and counseling process so that, in a very efficient way, a much broader array of people can experience the kind of support that they might get in career counseling and have access to the information about what makes them unique and how the ways that they’re unique intersect with opportunities and needs in the world of work so that they can make informed decisions about their lives.
And so what prevents people from getting access to the resources they need to really dig deep inside themselves and figure out what’s going to drive them to a satisfying day-to-day life?
Yeah, well, I think lots of things. I think for some people, there are internal reasons why we don’t pursue things that would be in our best interests. It maybe we lack confidence or we just lack awareness. There are also external reasons.
Some people just lack access to opportunity and many people lack time and resources and access to the support that would be really helpful. Click To Tweet
One-on-one individual career development support can be expensive and can also be a little bit tricky to figure out what’s a real high quality experience or service and what isn’t. I think breaking down some of those barriers and walls and granting people access to tools and resources to help them make informed choices just seems really important.
And so let’s first talk about these psychological barriers, because I think a lot of people understand pretty well what a monetary barrier is. A career coaching service will cost $1,000 and you just don’t have $1,000. But, psychologically, what prevents a lot of people from looking deeper inside themselves? Because the statistics have shown pretty consistently that more than half of people in America and an even higher percentage of a number of people worldwide are simply just not satisfied with what they do for work.
Yeah, I think a lot of people, if you ask them why they do what they do, they fell into it. They didn’t necessarily go through decision-making process that was really well informed. It was they knew somebody who had an opportunity, “My uncle talked to me about a job opportunity and I didn’t have anything else going so I decided to do it, and, suddenly, six, seven years later, here I am doing something I never thought I’d be doing.” That’s one reason. Another is I think people don’t really have just a great sense of the things that really drive job satisfaction. So if you think of it in terms of fit, we can look at how people differ in terms of their interests, what they enjoy, in terms of their personality, their characteristic traits, in terms of their values, what they really need in a work environment in order to be satisfied, all of these things people differ on. It’s not always easy, especially for young people as they’re coming of age, they’re still forming their identities and so forth, they don’t always have insight, and the culture imposes a timeframe for making these decisions as we transition from adolescence into early adulthood and so people feel lots of pressure and you got to do something, sometimes it just becomes overwhelming, and you end up just making choices based on impulse, not being as planful or as well informed as you’d like to be, or a lot of people, I think, make decisions based on what they think they ought to do or based on what their parents or the culture tells them that they should do rather than what really brings them joy and satisfaction and meaning and purpose. Unfortunately, for lots of folks, they’re well into adulthood when they realize how did this happen and how can I like back the truck up a little bit and then reengage in a way that’s more planful and that’s more likely to be satisfying?
Yeah, because I think what we’re talking about is, first of all, people are generally 18 years old when they’re going into college and they’re picking a major, picking something to study, and then you’re 22, 23 years old when you’re coming out of college, maybe a little bit older if you’re coming out with the advanced degree, master’s, postgraduate thing, and, at that point, I think the research shows that it takes until the age of 25 for your prefrontal cortex to fully form and then so many people say it takes ’til much later, potentially even into your 40s, to really understand who you are and what really drives you. So what can someone do at that age, the age of 22, say, coming out of college for most people, to really get to something that they really want to do to, I don’t want to say accelerate the process like our culture would dictate, but to work with someone at the age of 22 where they are in life?
I keep talking about the US because that’s where I live and operate and where you do. Different cultures and different national contexts have different systems that can stress the timeline a little bit. But I think one of the challenges is, for a traditional college student, like the person that you’re describing, so you start at 18, you have to declare a major at the midpoint, if not earlier, at least by the midpoint. So now you’re 20 and so there’s lots of pressure to then — I mean, you’ll get letters from the registrar saying, “We’re not gonna let you register for classes until you tell us what your major is,” if you’re undecided. So that’s a requirement. And I think a lot of students just aren’t quite sure what lane to choose, especially folks who have broad interests where they — and I was one of these students when I was an undergraduate, I liked lots of different things and the thought of choosing one path, if that meant not choosing something else, can create paralysis in terms of decision making for folks, figurative paralysis, obviously. People choose what’s interesting to them without having a clear sense of where that leads and by the time someone is 22, if they’ve got enough credits and they’re looking at graduating, they may be playing catch up a little bit and seeing what’s available that links to the training that they’ve received. And even then, the array of options that are available have decreased quite a bit just based on the decisions they’ve made. For somebody at 22, to answer your question directly, adaptability is key. I just painted a picture where the array of options is narrowed but the reality is that lots of people have career paths that look meandering and they end up in a place that’s pretty far removed from where they started and I think embracing that as an option or possibility, recognizing that, “Hey, my interests may be very stable but the way I can express those, I’ve got more options than maybe I realize, and a big key is developing the capacity to just sort of recognize and roll with the changes that inevitably I’m going to confront.” So that ability to adapt, I think, is probably pretty crucial for somebody in that age bracket.
So, in a way, it’s accepting the fact that I’m a 22-year-old and I’m picking something now and this is based on an imperfect understanding of who I am, because I have so much more maturing to do to really realize who I am and what my true purpose is and just roll with that uncertainty, roll with like, “I’m making the best decision for what I know now and in five years, I’ll know myself so much better and it’s likely gonna lead me somewhere different.”
Yeah, I think that kind of attitude does take the pressure off a little bit, just recognizing that my first job out of school is not going to lock me in, it’s just the first job, it’s a stepping stone and it’s an opportunity to learn and grow and then reevaluate. I think that’s a healthy perspective to have. I will say if those choices that you make that lead you to where you are at 22 are more informed than what’s typical for college students, there’s a way to make more informed choices, understanding your unique attributes, who you are, and how they intersect with the world of work, then probably you’re not going to feel caught off guard and stuck, you’re going to have a higher level of confidence than what might otherwise be the case. And so that’s where, when I talk about interests and values and personality and workplace culture preferences, these kinds of things, like these are things we can assess in people and then give them information about those and have them interact with that and think about, “Okay, how am I unique on these characteristics? And what are the implications of that for what kind of work I’m gonna find satisfying?”
So it sounds like what you’re saying is that, even with an imperfect understanding of yourself, whatever age you’re at, if your understanding of yourself is still imperfect, it’s still missing something, it’s still evolving, if you’re asking the right questions, if you’re making the right evaluation, you’re still going to come to a better result. What is the difference between a traditional manner in which people pick something to pursue that often has resulted in a lot of this disengagement, dissatisfaction, unhappiness that we have historically seen and a better, more informed, more — the techniques that you are advocating that people look into when they pick a pursuit?
Yeah, I think, often, people make choices on the basis of what pays the most, kind of the give me the best options in terms of employability, what jobs are the hottest, that kind of thing. I mean, I think of The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman’s character being told, “You should go into plastics.” This was the 1960s. It’s like — I mean, people have been getting that advice forever, go where the jobs are.
That’s not a bad consideration but, for long-term satisfaction, I think it’s really important to start with understanding what you really enjoy and what you value. Click To Tweet
A lot of times, I use this metaphor of the boat and this comes from E. K. Strong, Jr., pioneer in vocational interest measurement, wrote this analogy decades ago, and you think of a boat has a motor and a rudder, yeah, those things are integrated in modern boats, but the point is the rudder determines the direction of the boat and the motor determines how fast and how far the boat goes in that direction. Well, people are like that too, and for people, the rudder is interests, and, secondarily, values. So you think about what you enjoy, that determines what kind of direction a person heads in and then their abilities and skills, their personality, that determines how successful they are when they head in that direction. But just because a person is good at something, they can perform well, that doesn’t mean that that thing is going to provide long-lasting enjoyment and meaning and satisfaction for them. People can be good at things they don’t actually enjoy that much. And so, to me, the starting point is always understand your interests, what kinds of things you enjoy, let that be the driver in the first wave of decisions, and then, within that, you can develop and train and learn the skills you need to be successful within that path, but the interest will provide a sustaining motivation and then you can develop the skills and what you need to be successful after that. Had I known that earlier on, I mean, I got there over the course of my career, it took me a while to figure it out and it involved a little bit of trial and error and the passage of time and that kind of thing and one of the things that we’re able to do with assessments is give people reliable and valid information that can maybe speed up that process and make it a little more efficient.
Yeah, because that can be, for a lot of people, especially people who started out in life doing what they felt like they were supposed to do, that situation we talked about, and then all of a sudden they wake up one day and they realize, “I’m miserable and my work life is seeping into my other areas of life,” because if you’re not a happy person at work, then you go and whether you’re in a relationship or not or whether you’re trying to meet people, whether you have friends, people are going to distance from you if you’re miserable all the time or people are going to not want to get close to you if you’re miserable all the time so getting stuck in that. So you’re talking about preventing getting stuck in that spot for too long or making that whole process a lot more seamless for a lot more people and saying, okay, yeah, there’s going to be some trial and error, you’re going to have to figure out what you want, but don’t get stuck in this spot for a long time like some of us, unfortunately, did.
Yeah, I think so. It’s a game of odds. Human beings are very difficult to measure precisely and to make predictions with 100 percent accuracy, but what we can do is just sort of like make the odds as high as possible, that the steps a person takes is going to lead to joy and satisfaction in their lives.
Now, do you see some aspects of basic human needs in there? For example, a lot of people complain about feeling like just a cog in the wheel or something like that, feeling that you have some sort of creative say, like are these basic universal needs same to everyone or are there some people that you observe that need them more than others and other people that maybe this job is very much cut and paste, plug and play, follow a procedure, but some people are just right for that and other people aren’t?
Yeah, I think a little of both. There are some universal human needs, the need to belong, what Viktor Frankl called the will to meaning, the need to make sense of your experience and to feel that it matters, I think are universal, are things that everyone experiences. But in terms of how those things find expression within the world of work, some people have different preferences than others in terms of what they need in a work environment in order to be satisfied. So some people need lots of independence and feel really hemmed in and kind of miserable if there’s lots of structure in their environment.
I know how that feels, yeah.
Yeah, see? You and I are cut from the same cloth. I mean, one of the joys of academic life is I have lots of latitude. But other people feel lost without lots of structure. They need that in order to feel like they know what they’re doing and they are staying on track, that kind of thing. Now, to get back to kind of the root of your question in there about feeling like a cog in the system and that kind of thing, I do think that jobs differ in terms of how much dignity they offer.
Yeah, for sure.
And so self-determination, the ability to sort of like express who you are in the job, the more people are able to do that, usually, the better off they are in terms of their satisfaction. And when they’re prevented from doing that because the work is rote or is so highly structured, then the harder that can be. And there are ways to change your approach to work if you’re in a job like that, think about the relational aspects of it, the folks you work with, that kind of thing, but usually it requires compensatory strategies like that in order to find meaning when you’re in jobs that are difficult like that. And that’s one of the things when people talk about robots coming for all of our jobs, that kind of thing, there is a kind of like positive flip side and some of the jobs that can be more easily automated are the jobs where there’s probably less self-determination built in already and I think history shows us that technological innovation, so far in history, it’s always created more jobs than it’s replaced.
Well, you just touched on another area of interest of mine, which is my futurist side, the part of me that always wants to speculate about the future. I thought about the same topics. There’s a lot of people who say they’re coming for our job. Once certain key job groups are automated, there’s going to be some sort of massive uprising that’s going to cause some sort of terrible result when the Luddite movement of 200-ish years ago was predicting pretty much the same exact thing with the industrial revolution because no one at that point could really picture an automobile industry that way, eventually sprang up from that. So, one of the things I’m wondering is that you’re looking at this automation, are you saying that automation is going to potentially eliminate some of these less dignified jobs? As you say, there is a dignity difference between some jobs and others.
I always have to be careful playing futurist because anyone who plays this game has to recognize that some of what they foresee maybe will come to pass but they’ll be way off in other regards. But it is fun to speculate.
Always.
Yeah. To me, if you think of work as an opportunity to engage in creative service, like express your gifts in ways that contribute value to the world, it’s just easier to do that when you have more latitude than what’s afforded by the stereotypical factory job where you’re pulling a lever all day. Some of that is you read Studs Terkel, that book, Working, and you see how crushing that kind of work can be. From my understanding of the literature on this, you mentioned the Luddites. Yeah, anytime there’s a wave of technological innovation that applies to work, then there’s kind of widespread fear that this is going to take all of our jobs, when in reality, it takes some jobs and then it creates other jobs.
So people just got to adjust.
They’ve got to adjust and the culture has to take seriously the need to train and to equip people with a different or broader array of skills and abilities to be competitive for those jobs, but if we do that well, then I do think that people end up winning.
Yeah. And, for sure, like it is a little bit of a trap and I fall for it probably a little bit too much to try to speculate the future. I like to speculate whether or not the 40-hour workweek is going to go by the wayside with automation and what that could possibly mean for other life outcomes, such as our isolation, some of the other things that are making us anxious, but, of course, we never know how it’s going to work because there were economists 100 years ago predicting that the 40-hour workweek would be gone by the end of the last century, and, if anything, we work more, so we don’t know.
Exactly. One of the things that all these innovations do not change is fundamental human nature and so that’s — I think we always have to remind ourselves that people have the same kind of motivations across decades and so those kinds of things are hard to shake.
Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, we live in an interesting time because people are realizing that some of the things we’ve done recently aren’t necessarily making us happy, including, as you’ve been observing your whole life, how we choose what job we choose, but we probably still got a little ways to go to figure out, okay, what is it that we need to do to make us happier? And so, what I’m wondering is, when you’re talking with people about different jobs, you briefly brought up people pick jobs based on where the opportunities are, where the money is, things like that. Are there other areas of life such as do you need this big house or anything else that people need to go into their heads and reevaluate when selecting a career and selecting a lifestyle that’s going to make them actually happy as opposed to what a lot of people do today?
I think so. For people who have real needs, which is more than half of the global population, who really are insecure when it comes to feeding their family and themselves, then resources really are crucial to their wellbeing. If your survival needs are not met, then that is essential. The evidence that I see shows that once you get to that point where your basic needs for survival are met and can be counted on, then the relationship between income and wellbeing is essentially zero. I’ve worked with lots of folks who wake up in midlife realizing, “Yeah, I’ve built this like mini empire here and now I’m chained to it with these golden handcuffs and I’m miserable.” I mean, you described some examples of that earlier. And so, to me, it just comes back to, look, are you in a role in your vocational life where you are expressing your gifts in ways that make the world better? Where there’s a fit, where you’re like a swimmer gliding with the current rather than laboring against it? I can operationalize fit. We can talk about this in really specific terms, measuring different dimensions of individual differences within people and then mapping those on to opportunities and needs in the world, this is essentially what PathwayU does. This is the product that jobZology developed that is an online assessment system that a person responds to a series of items, gets some feedback about these characteristics that make them unique, interest, values, personality, workplace cultural preferences, and then can explore careers that show up for them based on algorithms that combine all that information and then map that on to the differences that exist between jobs in the world of work. And when people are looking at jobs that fit them well and then they make choices that allow them to build careers within the world, in spheres that fit them well, then, it just makes it much more likely that they’re going to feel like, “Hey, the weaknesses that I have, they’re things that I’m working on, but, you know what, I don’t need to rely on them in my job and the strengths that I have, the things that just come naturally to me, those are things that are front and center in the work that I do.” And when people are in situations like that, everything just feels right. It feels easier, it just feels less taxing. Work is invigorating for people like that. It’s not draining. I mean, imagine that. All the people that have been sort of turned out through the pandemic and now are just sort of living with a lot of misery, think back to what it might have been like or maybe a time when it was for you where you wake up eager to get to work, excited about it. The spillover effect you’re talking about where workplace misery starts to bleed into other areas of your life. It works with workplace joy too. I mean, when things are going really well and you’re really excited on the job, then that spills over into your relationships also and people recognize, “Wow, Bryan’s got a spring in his step because things are going well for him,” and it’s like, “I wanna be around people like that.”
Oh, for sure. I mean, we all love being around people like that. And according to the research that I’ve read, you probably know this better than me, it feels like the percentage of people that actually are in that place is somewhere around 15 to 20. Can you spot a person and just have a conversation with them and have a good idea, “Okay, this seems like the kind of person who’s actually got that spring in their step because they’re pursuing the right things,” or talk to this other person and say, “Oh, my God, he seems like he’s just really, really in a bad place and consuming a lot of negativity in his day to day”?
Well, absolutely. I mean, you can tell within about 30 seconds. Tell me about your experience of your job right now and some people, their faces brighten just being asked the question. It’s like the energy starts to brim up within them and then you can’t shut them up because they love talking about it. And other people, they’re just like, “You gotta be kidding me,” and their face does the opposite and you can see the energy just get sucked out of them just even thinking, “How do I even start responding to that?” So, obviously, for most of us, the experience is not black or white. It’s not, “Oh, everything is great,” or, “Everything’s totally miserable.” It fluctuates from day to day, maybe even from hour to hour. So these are complex things. Again, I just think about it in terms of probabilities.
And then for someone that’s in that unfortunate place where they’re just really miserable with what they do from day to day, what’s a realistic timeframe, say, they come to your program or any similar program in which they can get from this totally miserable place to a place where their odds are a lot better and they’re at least swimming with the current, as you mentioned before?
Yeah. I mean, that’s a hard question to answer, Stephen, because it’s dependent on so many factors. So, for example, somebody who’s got a family with young kids and there’s a lot of financial obligation that they’re responsible for, obviously, making big wholesale changes to their work situation, you have to be really careful and thoughtful about it because you’re not in a position where maybe you have the freedom to take big risks. Whereas someone with fewer obligations and a little more latitude, it’s a bit easier for. And so the timeframe, I’d say it all depends. It depends on a person’s circumstances in life. It also depends on what type of changes we’re making. There are ways to change an existing situation without leaving it as well, like some of the folks who talk about job crafting pointing out that we’re not passive recipients of our work environments, we can be active shapers of it. We can change the way we think about the job, the tasks that we engage in, the relational experience on the job and you can take something that’s miserable and at least make some improvements within it. So that might be an interesting starting point for a lot of folks, just try that out and see how it goes. But for folks who actually need to change paths entirely, the timing can be tricky but where it’s helpful to work with somebody who can guide you through that, then you can sort of take a step back, come up with a plan, and implement it in a way that works for you, for your family.
And that makes sense. And the idea that the first wave is internal, that you change your thoughts first and then what’s around you changes later is an idea that I’ve been entertaining quite a bit over the past couple of years, just thinking about it like, yeah, okay, this is not a perfect situation but there’s this idea out there that going into any situation, if you have a preconceived notion about how it’s going to go, it’s way more likely to end up confirming your thought process.
Yeah, the self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yeah, that, exactly.
Yeah, I totally agree.
And so tell me a little bit about, you mentioned PathwayU, how the jobZology goes, like you said, it seems like you work with both college students as well as people doing career transitions, you mentioned midlife crisis, is this something that people who have other challenges qualify for, (a), to enter the program, to fulfill it, and then what do they do after they take the self-assessment?
What we have is a product. It’s a software as a service, an online career assessment system. It’s a platform. And so one of the ways we make that available is by partnering with colleges and universities and so we’ve got about 150 of those who licensed the product and then deploy it with their students, but anyone can pay for a lifetime membership. It’s very affordable, you just go to pathwayu.com and follow the links and then, basically, a user will create a profile, log in, takes a series of assessments, it only takes about 25 minutes, these are measures of interest, values, personality, and workplace culture preferences. They are scientifically supported, high level of reliability and validity. Basically, these are the highest quality measures that we could find and develop that are as short as possible.
You want to balance the user experience with the quality of the information. Click To Tweet
So a person takes those and then immediately receives feedback that they can interact with and think through, “Okay, this is sort of a new way to describe me and to understand how I’m unique and to think about how that showed up in my life,” and then to use that to project forward. So it provides that feedback, but then there’s also a career match tool where it takes that information and then, based on your unique pattern of psychological characteristics, it generates some occupations that are predicted to fit you well. Doesn’t tell you what you should do with your life, no assessment or system can possibly do that, but it does give you access to information that just helps you make informed choices to increase your sense of confidence and planfulness so that the choices you’re making, you’re not flying blind and you’re also not only going by what other people are telling you you should do or what looks like it’ll pay the most, instead, you’re thinking about, “Hey, how am I unique? What are the implications of that in terms of choosing a career path that’s going to fit me well?” And then, on the back end, there’s a whole suite of tools that are available for folks. So a person can decide on a career path to pursue then they can search for available training, they can search for open jobs related to that, they can get some support within the system on refining my resume or preparing for an interview or negotiating a job offer, all of that. So, it’s designed to be self-directed. Somebody could log in and, in a self-contained system, go through all the steps on their own, but our data suggests that it’s especially effective when facilitated with human interaction, pulling together a personal board of directors, people in your life who you can bounce ideas off of and seek some feedback, working with other trusted mentors, obviously, if folks have access to a counselor, that is very effective as well. Not everyone has that and so it’s not limited to that scenario in how it’s deployed. But, yeah, so that’s a little bit about PathwayU.
And so for the sake of the listeners out there, it’s pathway with the letter U dot com.
That’s right. Pathway then the letter U dot com. Pathwayu.com, yeah.
What are the average users going to look through after they take the self-assessment?
Yeah, so there are some videos embedded in the system to help you understand a day in the life of different types of jobs, a lot of the tools — yeah, and a lot of the tools are text based but interactive. There’s a workbook that we’ve piloted and tested and that folks find useful that will give you some writing exercises to help you just sort of engage your results in a deeper way that’s available within the system so a variety of different ways that people can engage in the information.
Nice. And so people who are enrolled in these universities, 150 universities, have access to it based on the university itself paying for access to the program. Now, I’ve described this as a self-assessment every time I’ve referenced this, but there is a school of thought out there and you mentioned the board of directors that says that, sometimes, you can have your own blinders and you might need other people. So would you recommend or possibly advise people to look into having this board of directors, your closest friends, be there with you while doing the self-assessment and say, “Is this really a strongly agree or is this just how I want to perceive myself versus what I really am?”?
Yeah, there’s kind of informal self-assessment where you just think about your experience, “What do I think about myself?” then there’s the using assessment methods that require responding to a series of items. That’s what PathwayU includes. That’s a type of self-assessment but it’s a little bit different in that those instruments have been validated. There’s research demonstrating that the scores that they generate are reliable and also predict outcomes. There’s a little bit of some objectivity that gets inserted then, it goes beyond just thinking about myself to actually responding to items that have been vetted and so forth. The best way to approach decisions like this is to use multiple sources of information. So certainly self-assessment, thinking about your own experience, objective psychological assessments like what we’ve described, but then, for sure, interacting with other people. And I always say, think about three to five people who know you well, who have your best interests in mind, who don’t have an agenda other than supporting your wellbeing, and maybe who don’t know each other, who you might know in different contexts, so if you’re seeking input from folks who you know, somebody at work, somebody from school, a long-term friend, a family member, you got people who interact with you in different life roles and when you receive feedback from them, look for where that feedback converges. When you’re hearing the same thing over and over again from people who know you from different places, then probably there’s something to that theme that’s emerging or whatever. And so it’s all about creating the conditions in which you have the information you need to make decisions with confidence and more information is better and different types of information is better as well. So, yeah, that’s how I would put it together.
So, interesting, the process is to take the assessment, watch some of the videos, see what the day in the life of some of these things are but then also really pay attention to this feedback, especially if it’s consistent, three or four different people are all saying, “Oh, yeah, you tend to do this,” or, “I don’t know how you would ever like that.” When people who know you best are saying, “I don’t see you doing this job and being happy,” then, there’s definitely something to —
Exactly. And when someone says that, you can say, “Well, tell me more about that. Why would you say that?” and then it just allows you to kind of think this through in a deeper way. So, yeah, for sure, that’s very helpful.
Also, we’re created to be in relationship, like these kinds of decisions are best made not in a vacuum but in the context of those relationships. Click To Tweet
For sure. And then what does the future hold for PathwayU, jobZology? Are you looking to expand, have a greater impact, integrate with job search tools? Because we all know that our current method of finding jobs is full of unnecessary anxiety for a lot of people.
That’s right. Yeah. Well, for sure, expansion. So we have 150 schools, there’s a lot more than that out there so we’d love to have more and more students accessing what we’re able to provide and using that to inform their decision making. The attributes that we measure, I’ve listed them now several times, things like interest, values, these things are really stable. The way they find expression changes over the lifespan. Traits, they tend not to change a lot on average. The things that you’re interested in now are probably going to look pretty similar to the things that you’re interested in down the road. And so, that being the case, there are long-term implications for this and these instruments are valid at later points in life as well, even transitioning to retirement. So, long term, finding other opportunities to deploy the platform that we’ve developed, like for employers with employee development, for example, or helping people navigate the transition to retirement, these are all ways these same basic principles can be applied. So there’s a lot of room for growth and we’re excited about the work that we’re doing now and we’re excited about the possibilities for doing it better and doing more of it in the future.
Well, as the host of this podcast, I’m excited about anything that’s going to help get people out of that situation where they feel stuck, disengaged, and not really living their best life because all these things are not considered. So, hopefully, this product, combined with a whole bunch of other products that people are developing elsewhere, helps get us to the point where instead of Sunday scaries, “Thank God, it’s Friday” being the rule as it is now to being more of the exception, of saying, “Okay, there are some people that really —” you’re never going to get everyone but, more often than not, people are happy with what they do and they’re like, “Yeah, the weekend was fun. Now it’s Monday, now it’s time to go back to work,” or whatever day of the week it is because we do need to reject the one-size-fits-all work culture that the assembly line and then the work culture that derived from the assembly line that people didn’t really think about for a few decades after we’d left the assembly line really, really meant. Bryan, I would like to thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, talking to us about the jobZology, the PathwayU program, all your research into what really brings someone into the right job. And I would like to thank everyone out there listening and encourage you to, if you’re in that spot in life where you don’t like Monday or you don’t like what you’re doing, to really think about what are your values, your interests, and what job culture that you really want to be in.
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About Bryan Dik
Bryan Dik, Ph.D., is a vocational psychologist and professor of psychology at Colorado State University, where he serves as Director of Training for the university’s Ph.D. program in counseling psychology. He is also co-founder and Chief Science Officer of jobZology and co-inventor of the award-winning PathwayU career assessment platform. Bryan’s scholarly work focuses on meaning and purpose in the workplace, calling and vocation in career development, and the intersection of faith and work. He has delivered keynote lectures on four continents, has published four books (including Redeeming Work and Make Your Job a Calling), and hosts the Purposeful Work Podcast. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and American Scientific Affiliation, and is recipient of the John Holland Award for Outstanding Achievement in Career or Personality Research (APA Div. 17) and the Applied Psychology of Religion and Spirituality Award (APA Div. 36). He lives with his wife Amy and their four sons in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA.