1. Submitted by Kim Bulger
CARD 1060, October 15, 2012
THE CASE STUDY OF CHERYL,
HUMAN RESOURCES PROFESSIONAL
2. Age:
• 28 years old
Education:
• B.A. (English), Certificate Human Resources Management
Career path to-date:
• Management training program (Major Grocer Chain)
• Temporary employee turned contract full-time administrator (branch of
school board)
• Contract-turned-permanent HR Claims Administrator (school board)
• Current Human Resources Information Systems Supervisor (school board)
AN OVERVIEW OF CHERYL
3. Career goals include:
• Personal growth and development/ life-long learning
“I don’t want to stagnate”
• Always be challenged by her work
• Have a leadership role
“I love leadership, and I’m pretty good at it, too”
• Enjoy what she does.
• No particular “dream position” in mind
“I’m always open to opportunities as long as I’m growing. I honestly don’t
know where I’ll be in fifteen years”
AN OVERVIEW OF CHERYL
4. • Exploration: During studies and up to first HR job.
• Establishment: Beginning this stage since employment in HR at
schoolboard. Stabilization within organization and occupation; striving
to achieve more.
• Maintenance and Disengagement not applicable yet.
A note about typical career cycles, women, and C.S.:
C.S. and her spouse have no plans for children. It seems the typical family
disruptions to women’s career cycles will not apply in her case.
CAREER AS A CYCLE:
CAREER STAGES
7. Mini Stage Cycle Circumstance
Exploration Apply for & obtain position, onboarding, training
Trial Begin doing position on own, learning nuances
Mastery “I’ve mastered it; I’m not learning anything from it anymore”
Exit Advanced to a leadership role in HR department
CAREER STAGES: MINI CYCLE
Claims Administrator role (First HR position)
8. Organizational Entry:
• Downsizing and layoffs are imminent. Could career with this organization
end as quickly as it had started?
• Like the organization, not so fond of the first position held in the
organization
Occupational Choice:
• To specialize in an HR area, or be a generalist?
• Feeling pigeon-holed in disability and claims management
CAREER AS A CYCLE:
EARLY CAREER ISSUES
9. E: Leadership, public speaking, deal with people rather than things
I: Math/science abilities, solve complex problems, deal with ideas
S: Interested in social relationships, helping others solve problems
Per Inkson, p.111, Table 5.1: The EIS type corresponds with lawyer.
Per C.S.: “I actually always wanted to be a lawyer”
CAREER AS FIT:
JOHN HOLLAND’S RIASEC
DIMENSIONS
My Estimation of C.S.: C.S.’s Estimation of herself:
Enterprising, Social, Realistic Enterprising, Investigative, Social
10. Cheryl Current Occupation – HR Manager
Enterprising Enterprising
Investigative Social
Social Conventional
CAREER AS FIT:
JOHN HOLLAND’S RIASEC
DIMENSIONS
Cheryl has chosen a reasonably good fit for herself, as her occupation is both enterprising
and social which she self-identified as her type
11. Metaphor Strength Weakness
Career as Cycle (Stages) Easy to identify the overall
stages (exploration,
establishment, etc) of one’s
career.
Enables individuals to plan
and predict according to
this model.
“The best is yet to come” –
for a young individual,
much has yet to be
experienced
Mini-cycles, external
influences (e.g., layoffs),
etc. have unpredictable
influence
Career as Fit Person’s interests, abilities
and values stay reasonably
stable even as external
influences creep in.
Many additional factors
affect the actual person-
work situation fit.
Occupations vary within
themselves
CAREER AS CYCLES OR FIT? BEST
ANALOGY?
12. Inkson, K. (2007) Understanding careers: the metaphors of working lives. Thousand
Oaks, California: Sage Publications, Inc.
O*NET Info (2011) Summary report for 11-3121.00 Human Resources Managers.
Retrieved October 2012 from http://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/11-
3121.00
REFERENCES
Editor's Notes
Cheryl is a 28 year old Human Resources Professional. She is one of the most determined and driven people I know. She has a bachelor of arts in English, and started her certificate of Human Resource Management in the last year of her degree so that she would have an employable profession (as it is often difficult to find work with an undergraduate language degree).
While studying in university, Cheryl worked at a major grocer chaim. Toward the end of her Certificate program, she was promoted into the Management Training Program where she took every available opportunity to gain experience in HR functions such as staffing, payroll, performance management, and so on. She called these “HR Encounters”.
Shortly after getting married, she became fed up with the trainee position, decided she needed to devote even more time to finding a job in HR, so she quit Sobey’s and registered with a temp agency.
Her first temp assignment was for administrative work with a school board, which turned into a longer-term position where she worked on the board’s payroll.
When that job ended, she was unemployed briefly until her resume was given directly to a hiring HR manager with the board by her previous supervisor. She was hired the next day
For the next two years, Cheryl worked as a disability and benefits claims administrator. Initially she enjoyed the job, especially the learning curve. However, after about a year she began to feel stagnant and threats of downsizing worried her. She started looking for other internal/external opportunities.
Cheryl is currently the HRIS supervisor, where she works with the human resources information system in depth and supervises a team of 6. She is enjoying the HRIS and the leadership aspects of her job.
Cheryl’s goals are all focused around personal growth and development. She wants to be challenged by her work, be in a position to lead others (as she is quite good at this), be happy in her job, and always remain learning. When asked what her dream job would be, or where she sees herself in 10-15 years, Cheryl said that she doesn’t have any particular goal career in mind. Rather, as long as she is always learning, growing and happy, she will take opportunities as they come and see where her career takes her.
Cheryl is only 28, so according to both her and Donald Super’s Theory of Career Development (since further developed by Savickas), she has only experienced some of the stages of Super’s theory of career development so far. Super’s theory, summarized, states:
Individuals are all different, and have potential for many occupations.
Individuals are constantly changing, adjusting to extermal and role influences.
Career development occurs in stages: Growth, Exploration, Establishment, Maintenance, and Disengagement, and is patterned.
Work is important to the individual, and satisfaction depends on the individual, the role, and status.
We will explore the Exploration and Establishment stages of Chery’s career in the upcoming slides.
The maintenance and disengagement stages are still to come for Cheryl. Since she is very much into ceasing opportunities as they present themselves, it is possible that the maintenance stage will only exist in short bursts for Cheryl as she seeks to constantly evolve her career and experiences “mini-cyles” Inkson’s textbook discusses how the career cycles of women often differ because of women’s unique role in childbearing and subsequent family responsibilities. Cheryl does not plan to have children, so that likely won’t have an impact on her career development as seen from a cyclical point of view.
Let’s talk in-depth about the Exploration stage.
Super posits that the exploration stage is when we learn more about ourselves and act upon career choices by developing our skills and taking various jobs.
Cheryl’s exploration stage consisted of taking her English degree because she enjoyed it, and then deciding that she wanted to educate herself and work in Human Resources. From there, she made it her mission to seek every HR learning experience that she could (and we were good friends so I can tell you from an outside perspective that she was incredibly driven), including networking opportunities.
The exploration stage for Cheryl seems to have lasted until she secured her first job in Human Resources with the school board.
Now let’s delve into the Establishment stage.
The establishment stage is what Super calls the stage where we continue to stabilize ourselves in our occupations and organizations as we solidify our self-concept and values structures.
Cheryl’s career is currently in the establishment stage.
She is 28 years old and has been working in Human Resources for three years. She is a Certified Human Resources Professional, and she is now in the second HR position of her career which has more responsibility than did her first. She enjoys the field of HR, and she is building her network. She feels that she is reaching a point in her career where she can call upon people in her network to attest to the quality of her work and help her achieve her goals. One of her goals for now is to continue to excel in her work and build a reputation as an important contributor both on her HR team for the school board and in her professional network.
She is always building her skills and looking for the next great opportunity.
Cheryl’s career has experienced at least one mini-cycle. An example of a mini-cycle in her career is her last role as a disability and claims administrator. When she first submitted her application for the job, she wasn’t even 100% sure of what the job entailed because she was recommended for the role on short notice before she even knew it existed. She learned about the role during the application process, her onboarding with the HR team, and the training she got from her manager. This is well-represented by the “exploration” stage
The “trial” stage of the mini-cycle occurred as Cheryl took over her position and learned by doing. As she gained experience managing worker’s compensation claims and disability claims, she learned how to effectively navigate the claims systems, including the nuances of WCB policy and when/how to appeal decisions on claims.
Once Cheryl had been in her role as claims administrator for about a year, she felt she’d mastered the role. She was efficient, excelling, but grew bored and unhappy in that role.
The “exit” stage occurred when Cheryl began applying for other opportunities, and progressed to a supervisory role in the HR department. She had exited the claims role.
Cheryl is still in the early part of her career. Some issues that typically pertain to early careers occur when choosing an occupation, and then when entering a new organization.
For Cheryl, the process of occupational choice has been gradual. First she chose to pursue HR academically, and then she faced labour market entry issues. Halifax is overrun with new HR program graduates (speaking as one), and Cheryl graduated during a recession when many HR professionals were losing jobs and vying for entry-level HR positions.
Moving on to issues of organizational entry. Once Cheryl got set up in her claims administrator role, it became clear that downsizing and layoffs were imminent, along with restructuring of the HR department. It was unclear whether she would be kept on since she was the newest team member. Additionally, she was not very fond of her manager nor the position she held after a while. Returning again to occupational choice issues. Once she got established in her first HR role, her next decision became whether she should specialize in an HR niche (such as disability case management) or become a generalist? Cheryl enjoys variety and decided to strive for a generalist career. She felt pige
John Holland proposed that both people and jobs have “vocational personality”. There are six primary types of vocational personality: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional. We can classify people and jobs by ranking their top three types. People and jobs can then be matched on the best fit between them based on their Holland Types.
After looking at my interview with Cheryl, I attempted to estimate her Holland profile on my own. I would have said she is enterprising, social, and realistic. After explaining Holland Types to Cheryl, she estimated herself as EIS.
Enterprising: She enjoys leadership roles, likes to deal with people. She is a good public speaker. Investigative: She is good with numbers, likes to analyse and solve problems, and she likes dealing with conceptual frame works.
Social: She is interested in social relationships to an extent, and she enjoys helping people solve problems (pulled to the HR profession)
I looked up Cheryl’s current job as HRIS supervisor using O*Net (they include an interest inventory code in each profile, a tip I picked up in University). Her top-ranking Holland Type is Enterprising, which matches well with her current role. Both Cheryl and her job also rank high with the social type. Finally, Cheryl’s job is also conventional, which has a clerical/organizational aspect. While Cheryl may not classify herself as such, I can certainly see how this falls within her abilities.
In my estimation after using Holland Types to analyze both Cheryl and her current role, they are a fairly good fit for one another.
Every theoretical framework has its strengths and weaknesses. If I were to pick which of the two metaphors best applies to Cheryl’s career development so far, I would choose Career as Fit. One of the strengths of the Fit perspective is that a person’s perosnality,, interests and abilities stay fairly stable over time, even as external influences creep in. Meanwhile, in my opinion, career stages/cycles are heavily influenced by external influences such as the organization itself, family roles, etc, and that is a weakness. Additionally, Cheryl is young and has yet to reach a few of the stages, so it is difficult to describe her career to date with that perspective.
Conversely, the cycles metaphor helps to identify what stages of a career one might expect to hit. For example, it might be useful for Cheryl during her career planning to know that she may experience the exploration, trial, mastery and exit mini-cycle in each role she takes on, or that she will reach a maintenance stage in her career.
Finally, a weakness of the fit metaphor is that varience exists within each occupation depending on the organization, exact braedth of each job itself, and so on. This can all influence the overall fit between person and job. For example, had Cheryl enjoyed her claims administrator role, her manager may still have made it a bad fit for her in that particular job. It can be easy to see that as a bad fit between person and overall occupation and decide to simply move on.
