The Kaleidoscope Model of Career

The current essay will develop an analytical explanation of Mary’s career with the utilisation of the kaleidoscope model as the governing framework. This will mainly put focus on the three important components called the challenge, balance and authenticity. Moreover, it will also focus on another important motivation theory with the discussion of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation factors and the ways they guide the career making decisions of Mary.

Mary Williams had always been the achiever of the highest grades in her school and university years. She had been particularly keen about caring for people from the early ages of her career and therefore, she had taken up the job of being a nursing professional in the primary healthcare clinic. She particularly aimed to help the socio-economically marginalised people in the nation and always tried to go out of her scope to help them. However, after being an enrolled nurse in the primary healthcare clinics for one year, she was keen to take on further challenges and completed her masters to become an expert registered nurse. However, she was not satisfied with the job role as it was not providing her the opportunity to work closely with the communities and try her best to promote the health of the disadvantaged people. She had requested the authority to provide her scopes of health promotion programs and tae on further challenges for development of conditions of the indigenous people. However, the lack of nurses in the organisation and huge patient flow in the healthcare had prevented her from taking further opportunities. Therefore, she was seen to seek for resignation and try out other prospects. The authority wanted to hold her back because of her expertise by providing more incentives and other benefits. However, she did not see any career growths in the fields. She admitted herself into MBA studies in healthcare promotion and management with the hope that the degree would enable her to get associated with organisations taking large-scale projects for health promotion of different cohorts of people in the nation. However, she met another fellow healthcare professional who had the same vision. They fell in love and married soon. After the completion of the two year course, Mary found herself expecting and decided to put her aspirations for hold to make settle a family and give time to her infant. During these years, she used to work as freelancing mode as a project planner for different small agencies on contractual basis. After about six years, she decided to develop to get into a partnership with BGV charity and healthcare centre. This centre receives grant from some of the biggest governmental healthcare and finance departments and aspires to care and send for aides to different remote as well as marginalised communities not only for healthcare. They provided support with education, employment, agriculture, finance and many others. She is seen to enjoy her work to the fullest. She is seen to enjoy meeting the different communities, listen to their issues, help them overcome barriers and work in close proximity with them.

The Importance of Challenge in Mary’s Career

                                                          Fig: Mary’s career graph (Source: created by authorr)

The entire thinking and planning approach of Mary can be analysed with the help of Kaleidoscope model of career. This model suggests that three important components underpin the actions taken by individuals while planning and changing their career plans. These are authenticity, balance as well as challenge (Bimrose & Hearne, 2012). Researchers are of the opinion that certain issues pre-dominate the career decisions in lives of person at different point of time. Each of the three components mainly serve as the the decision making parameters which have the ability to cause a pivot in the thinking procedures about the importance of career at the particular point of time (Mainiero & Gibson, 2017).

Challenge is one of the most important components that are usually seen to govern the career of most women in the earlier part of lives. This component of the kaleidoscope model refers to the need of individuals to participate in intrinsically motivating work for growing and development of one’s skills and also to make progress in the career for the achievement of lateral progress, linear advancement as well as skill based programs (Glass and Cook, 2016). This component mainly refers to the need of an individual for stimulation as well as learning and skills for growth for increasing of the personalised capabilities. Studies have shown that challenge can be represented into a number of ways. These include desire of the individual in climbing the career ladder as well as discovering opportunities for retraining and developing a new skill set or new set of job tasks. It has been seen that Mary had big aspirations of developing the condition and bringing changes to the communities of disadvantaged people. However, her initial profession of being nursing professional was not allowing her the the full scope of developing health promotion initiatives for the communities. Huge work burden in the healthcare centres was not giving her the scope to achieve her dreams. She was not being able to successfully achieve her expected career prospective successfully (Hirschi, 2012). She was open for more challenging job roles of travelling to remote and marginalised communities and work for them. Hence, she was not found to be satisfied with her job and was always searching for more potential opportunities. Studies do accept that in earlier part of the career, one of the predominant career patterns for the women is to be concerned with different goal achievement as well as challenges in their careers.  Lyons (2015) had stated supported of the fact that balance as well as authenticity do remain active but they usually recede to the background while the woman seeks for challenging opportunities and pursues her career interest. Mary had been also seen to continuously thrive for challenging situations although she was balancing her present nursing profession and later her education with her romantic life.

The Role of Balance in Mary’s Career

Balance is the second component of the model. This component mainly focuses on the important aspects of work-family management as well as integration of the efforts on the parts of the employees for creating a work-life intersection that adjusts attention constantly to both the domains (Elley-Brown et al., 2018). In many cases, individuals are seen to take up assignments that allow them to restrict work hours or slow down career progression so that effective integration might take place between the family lives with work. Many are seen to leave their jobs in higher level of corporate and take jobs in lower agencies to spend more time with the family members. Several ways of rebalancing lives had been observed in different studies like adjusting work through part time employment, opting out of the workplace temporarily as well as taking turns with spouses, arranging different workloads so that it comes in accordance with family requirements as well as finding ways in meeting both demands simultaneously (Ramarajan & Reid, 2013). Therefore, it was seen that Mary’s priorities changed when she got married and her infant was born. She wanted to care and bring up her baby so that the baby does not lose his attachments with family members. However, her love for her work did not let her withdraw completely. Rather, she was seen to act as program development executive at home where she used to plan health promotion programs for smaller agencies who worked in communities at a smaller scale. This helped het to have enough time with her family at the same time enjoying her work. Therefore, she was seen to balance her work effectively. Researchers are of the opinion that in mid career, women must cope with different issues of balance and relational demands (Sullivan et al., 2018). This comes in the forefront. Women are also seen to wish for challenges as well as authenticity. However, these issues are seen take on the secondary roles as different compromises are made for balance issues (Rodrigues and Guest, 2010). Mary is also seen to pour more focus on her baby and her marital life and had kept her aspirations on secondary priority level.

Authenticity is the third component. This describes the need of an individual to behave and demonstrate their attitudes in accordance with their genuine selves. This might be in contrast to the behaviours they exhibit to survive their surroundings (Elley-Brown et al., 2015). Studies have shown this component represents the need of the individual to be true to herself and to her own values. This component is displayed through different behaviours which are resonant with different personal as well as work strengths of involvement in the activities. This would help in gaining personal pleasures, which genuinely reflect the inner nature of the individual. It has been seen that Mary was more interested in working with communities from a closer level that allowed her to stay with the community, develop intervention plan for them, develop their lifestyle factors. She also wanted to develop their living conditions through educating them and making them eligible for employments and many others (Carraher et al., 2014). Therefore, she she got the opportunity to practice her real values and dreams that she always wanted to achieve. She came into association and partnership with one of the largest voluntary organisation of the nation and undertook a travelling mode to every community and worked with them. In a way, she was successful in ensuring her real values and true selves while becoming one of the topmost members of the organisation she had always wanted to work with on leadership role. Researchers are of the opinion that in the late careers, women mainly become free from balance issues and in this situations, the cause of authenticity arise. Studies have indeed accepted that women wish for challenge but remain concerned for balance (Knowles, 2017). However, the kaleidoscope was seen to shift towards women’s choices and desires in each of the domain as dictated by the patterns of her life.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation in Career Decision Making

Another important theory that can be incorporated here for analysing Mary’s career is the boundaryless carer theory. Traditionally, careers used to be conceptualised in terms of the relationships that the employee shared with the organisation. Careers were found to be linear and mainly occurred within the stable hierarchal organisational structures. This helped employees to develop an “organisational career” where job mobility was low but security was high. The boundaryless career in the present generation described the modern thinking procedures of employees where they travel their career paths that are discontinuous and go beyond the boundary of a single firm (Arthur & Rousseau, 2001). The term boundaryless career mainly provides a new perspective that interlinks boundaries of organisations and occupations with other part of the lives of the people. The authors have described employment as an entity that is under the person’s control thereby having career agency. The boundaryless career is thereby portrayed as the entity as something out there that still needs to be discovered (Bravo et al., 2017). In case of Mary, it was seen that she was not satisfied with the scope and the boundary that her nursing profession was offering her. She wanted to go beyond the role responsibilities of caring for each people with a superficial consultation and want to work beyond the boundaries. Therefore, she left the job and joined the MBA in order to manage projects aimed at better healthcare and life development of disadvantaged communities. She was seen to explore her boundaries throughout and so she joined the charitable organisation that was different in working system to that of the healthcare centres she worked. Thus, it described how her career crossed boundaries to reach a fulfilling stage that satisfied her in her life.

Another important theory that can be applied is the protean theory that mainly describes the career that is driven by individual preferences and not by organisation (Hall, 1996). This concept was proposed by Douglas T. The most central feature of this form of career is that the person who is the protean would always put psychological success as well as self0fulfilment above every concerns and norms (Water et al., 2015). Mary was found to be never satisfied with the exposure and the scope that the profession of nursing was providing her. She was neither being able to achieve psychological success and could not feel self-fulfilment. Hence, she was seen to have a protean career where she left the job and seek for carrer in the voluntary organisations where she can fulfil her aspirations to work on a broader level with disadvantaged communities.

Job Satisfaction in Mary’s Career

Another important theory can be seen to be well established which can help in understanding the career planning and career development of every individuals in their lifestyle. This theory states the importance of intrinsic motivation. This form of motivation states the situations when the motivation stimuli of individuals are seen to come from within. The individuals are seen to develop the desire for performing a specific task because the outcomes are seen to be in accordance with the belief system (Deci & Ryan, 1985). This form of motivational stimuli is also seen to fulfil a desire or aspiration and therefore huge importance remain attached with them. Another form of motivation is called the extrinsic motivation. This mainly means that the motivational stimuli come from outside factors (Savickas & Porfeli, 2012). This mainly means that the desires of the individual to perform his or her responsibilities come from outside sources. The most debated extrinsic motivational stimuli are money. Besides, employee award, benefits and package, bonuses as well as organised activities act as extrinsic motivational stimuli. Researchers are of the opinion that extrinsic stimuli result in temporary impacts on the motivation on the individuals (Yates & Cahill, 2018). Therefore, individuals who are influenced by extrinsic motivational stimuli might not be able to maintain a consistency in the performance when stimuli are withdrawn. However, such is not the case in case of intrinsic motivation. In case of Mary, it is seen that she was influence by her internal motivational stimuli. She had aspired to treat and develop the marginalised community, as her dream to develop a safer and egalitarian world had been the main driver of her motivation. Since, this was her intrinsic motivation, the impact of it remained consistent throughout her career path and she tried to achieve all the objectives to reach to her goals. Even her last working organisation where she worked as a registered nurse tried to provide her extrinsic motivational incentives; it could not bribe her to change her life vision and mission. Hence, this explains her career approach significantly.

From the above discussion, it becomes clear that every working individual has different courses of career paths. The choosing of careers as well as career changing and development are governed by different factors in different individuals’ life. With the help of kaleidoscope model, the different phases of the career decisions can be analysed. On case of women, the initial career paths are seen to be lead by challenged whereas females prefer to balance their life in the middle part of their careers giving more focus to relations and families. However, towards the later part of the careers, they focus on maintaining authenticity while developing career opportunities. Intrinsic as well as extrinsic motivational stimuli are also seen to be driving factors for women regarding their career decisions.

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