Facilitating Career Development... including my own!
How I am growing as a career services professional, the Johari window, and what's coming up next!
It is suddenly November, with a feeling of fall in the air here in Taipei. When the sun goes down, I'm actually glad to be wearing long sleeves. It is also time for my favorite month of the year... National Career Development Month. (Okay, I doubt anyone outside of this industry cares, and in fact, I just found out myself.) But it does feel appropriate to share this month what I have been doing this fall.
In August, my family and I returned from our annual summer visit to relatives in the US, and for the first time since 2018, I sat down to consider how I wanted to grow in becoming a career advising professional. For more than a decade, I have wanted to do more with career development and help more young adults (and even adult professionals) who are searching for work that is fulfilling and helps them earn a living. What was this going to look like?
Facilitating Career Development
More than a year ago, I started talking to colleagues about my interest in pursuing career advising full time, and pretty soon, I started hearing the same piece of advice from a few different places: Get a credential. I knew that graduate school in this industry could easily take two years (like getting a master’s in counseling), which doesn’t work for me at this point in my life, but I grew to realize that some sort of formal training would help round out my knowledge of this field, put me in touch with other people doing the same thing, and help me identify more resources for the work that I want to do. As someone working by myself, this could also provide some structure for how I want to spend my time.
So in August, I started the online Facilitating Career Development course, developed by the National Career Development Association (NCDA). My instructor is a professor at Regis College with her own private practice as a career coach. Nearly three months in, I’ve finished half the course and been exposed to a lot of new things that make me feel like I am growing in the direction that I want to grow. I’m learning a lot about career development theory, ethics around practicing as a career advisor, and a lot of new skill sets and perspectives I can be using with students and young adults. To give an impression of what I’ve been exposed to, I’ll just share one thing I have learned and want to share with people so far, as an example of the sort of thing that gets me excited!
Picturing Yourself through the Johari Window
Psychology has contributed a lot to the field of career counseling/ advising, and one concept that has long been used in the psychology field is the Johari window. You can use this framework to explore yourself in four different ways, for which I will make up some examples in parentheses:
Arena: parts of you that are known to both yourself and other people (e.g. I am a graduate student, I am East Asian in appearance, and I speak English)
Facade: parts of you that are only known to yourself (e.g. I have a family health history of cancer that worries me, I am ashamed that I am overweight, I avoid public speaking opportunities because I used to stutter)
Blind Spot: parts of you that are only known to other people (e.g. people find me to be very overbearing, my boss thinks I am a lot more competent than I believe myself to be, I have a beautiful singing voice)
Unknown: parts of you that are yet unknown to yourself or anyone (e.g. how I will react when put into a certain high-pressure situation, my aptitude for learning a new language, what kind of a spouse or parent I will be)
Once you start thinking about yourself from these four different perspectives, you start getting a sense of how big some parts of you are versus other parts. What is surprising for you to see and consider? Where can you learn and grow? How can you bring a more authentic version of yourself to your family, your colleagues, your friends, and your community? There are endless questions to ask and consider, and no wrong way to fill out these four boxes. My favorite part is definitely Part 4, the unknown, which in a way represents our hidden potential. I have never undergone astronaut training, but perhaps I’d be excellent at it! At my age with my family, it is too late to reasonably become an astronaut, but it’s not too late to explore a lot of other things in my life and learn more about who I can be.
In working in career advising, it always makes me excited when I can help someone realize that they have a lot of potential and that the future is full of possibilities. At any age, whether you are 6 or 86, it is easy to get stuck in a rut and believe that you are bad at math, unable to have good work relationships with your colleagues, terrible at following orders and paying attention to details, or just limited in some way. But those feelings don’t help us figure out what we should do tomorrow or next year, how we should feed our families, and what decisions and life paths could make us happier. When you believe in that sense of possibility, you will find yourself looking for the next step to wherever it is you want to go.
What’s next?
I aim to finish the Facilitating Career Development class by the end of the calendar year. After the class, I will apply for the Certified Career Services Provider (CCSP) credential. As a result of what I’ve learned from this class, I am also working on creating new workshops and content to share throughout the coming year!
November is shaping up to be a busy month for me, but for my next Substack, I will take some time to recap two guest speaker events I had in October, one at a university in Taichung and another in Beijing, which helped me better understand my audience and message. Keep your eye out for that one!
If you are new to Career Camp or want to take this opportunity to start exploring your own potential, please feel free to get in touch with me by email (connie@career-camp.org) and introduce yourself, or go ahead and set up a free 30-minute appointment with me using my Calendly link. Let’s get started.
Wishing everyone a fun, productive November,
Connie