Understanding External Factors Influencing Career Paths: A Card Deck — M.Des. Seminar 3, Doing With Theory
This project was completed for Dan Lockton’s Fall 2018 Advanced Interaction and Service Design Concepts Seminar at Carnegie Mellon University.
For my Master’s thesis at Carnegie Mellon, I’m exploring ways to expose high school students in underserved neighborhoods to careers in tech. As part of my research, I have been trying to understand the ways in which people currently in the industry got there. During my interviews with tech workers I have been doing standard journey mapping exercises (I ask them to map out their journey and they call out key moments and emotions throughout). Though I am gaining good insight into the key events that take place along the journey to the industry, I feel as though I am not getting a complete understanding of the full breadth of factors influencing their path. I saw this as a gap in available research methods, so I set out to design and conduct a research method that allows me to better understand these influencing factors.
Background
Social Cognitive Theory & SCCT
To better understand the full breadth of influencing factors involved in someone’s journey, I looked to social cognitive theory(SCT), and social cognitive career theory (SCCT) for inspiration.
SCT says that humans don’t make decisions simply by taking an action, evaluating the results, and adjusting subsequent actions accordingly. Rather, their decisions are also shaped by the various social experiences in their lives. The world around them and how they observe that world also shapes their decisions. Environmental factors like social norms, cognitive factors like expectations, and behavioral factors like aptitude all play key roles.
SCCT is a relatively new branch of SCT that looks specifically at career decisions. It builds on SCT by identifying 3 key variables that play into career decisions: self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and personal goals. The same factors that exist in SCT exist in SCCT, but they contribute to these 3 key main variables.
The factors being described in SCT and SCCT are exactly the types of things I’m trying to understand about workers’ journeys into the tech industry. And though SCT/SCCT literature aims to quantitatively measure the effects of these factors, I believe there is a strong foundation for a set of qualitative prompts. They would allow me to go beyond a surface level understanding of someones journey and create a more colorful, representative picture.
Integrating SCCT Into Research
So I set out to design a research method that allowed participants to share their experiences with these external factors, and how they impacted their journey.
A card deck format made sense so that the user could see the various topics and move them around. For my first iteration, I created a set of Time cards and Influence cards. I created 4 Time cards, corresponding to key periods in career trajectory: Early Childhood, High School, College, and Professional Life. I created 8 Influence cards that covered various aspects of SCT/SCCT while still being understandable by the user: Peers, Culture, Expectations, Family, Skills, Economics, Performance, and Stereotypes. I selected the Influence by looking at common language in SCT/SCCT and chose factors that 1) participants would understand, 2) participants could identify experiences with, and 3) I thought would be most relevant to career-related experiences. For example, self-efficacy is a key component of career development, but it can be a hard concept for people to understand and articulate. For these reasons, I omitted it as an Influence card, hoping to understand through the conversations that arose through the other prompts.
I began to test these cards by randomly pairing Time and Influence cards and asking the user how the topic influenced them during that time period. Through this initial testing, I determined there needed to be a more structured format to the game, that the Influence cards needed some reworking to be understandable and exhaustive, and that the Time cards needed to be consolidated.
Journeys: The Card Game
The final iteration of the game I created is called Journeys. It consists of 3 Time cards and 11 Influence cards.
Time Cards
K-12, College, Career
Influence Cards
Exposure, Economics, Peers, Family, Interests, Culture, Aptitude, Stereotypes, Access, Expectations, Education
How To Play
Playing Journeys is simple. First, pick a Time card (it’s easiest to go in chronological order). Then, have the participant pick the Influence cards that were most influential to their career trajectory during that time period. Have them arrange the cards in order of importance. Finally, have them explain, going in order, how each Influence influenced them, asking followup questions as necessary. The Influence cards are merely suppose to be prompts for the participant to build on — almost like rorschach test. They can have a variety of interpretations of what each card means, and that is ok.
Learnings and Discussion
Initial Insights From Research
After conducting initial research with a few participants, I found some key takeaways relevant to my thesis:
- Every participant identified Family as the key influencer during the k-12 period. Family shapes both the expectations of a career and the set of possible careers. Engaging parents in a career exposure program will be key for younger children.
- College is a time of widening the range of what is possible. Exposure to new people, topics, and culture creates a new set of “case studies.” Recreating the these conditions in high school could help students envision different careers earlier.
- After entering the workforce, some of the realities of life begin to weigh heavier in decisions. Economic implications of career choices are particularly calculated. When speaking to working professionals, highlighting the economic opportunities of tech will be important.
- Over the long arc of a career, self-actualization comes to the forefront. As experience is gained, the question “What do I want to do with my life” becomes more important. When speaking to working professionals, highlighting the mission of the industry will be important.
Reflections On Research Method
Reflecting on the research method itself, I believe there are some things to consider when using this method yourself:
- The Influence cards are like a Rorschach test. Participants will project there own meaning onto them (which is good). For example, “Expectations” to one person may mean their own expectations, but to another may mean the expectations of society.
- People can’t be aware of all the external factors influencing their lives (for example, one’s self-efficacy is quite hard to articulate). But you can begin to understand those factors through discussion of others.
- Specific events in the participants life rarely came out during discussion. A participant’s their influences and motivations emerged, but conducting a traditional journey map first could help give context for the researcher. Or, if detailed, chronological events are not important, you could tailor follow-up questions to uncover specific events.
- This method helps shift your view of the user from someone making isolated decisions to someone being influenced by a myriad of factors. This change is perspective can be helpful in generating new ideas for design interventions leveraging these other factors.
Next Steps & Broader Application
Having conducted initial research with Journeys, there are two things I would consider moving forward:
- Adapting Journeys to journeys outside of career path. Journeys could provide great insight to a variety of user journeys. By allowing variance in Time cards and room for additional Influence cards, it could easily be adapted to these scenarios.
- Finding a way to integrate Journeys into a traditional journey mapping exercise would create a streamlined process where you can simultaneously understand the specifics of a journey, and the various influencing factors.
If you use Journeys in your research, adapt it for your own purposes, or have any thoughts, reach out to me with your comments!
