30 Jun The 3 Keys to your employability: adaptability, identity and networks

Beyond going up the  career ladder we all know that it is very important to keep our employability. While in the old days career paths were highly boundaried – we chose a career, a location and an organisation and stuck with them progressing steadily-. Nowadays our careers feel less linear and we are likely to make all sorts of moves and shifts.

We can´t trust employers to take care of our career development and employability nor can we outsource our career decision making process;  family, relatives, friends or even the academic world. 

How the Psycho-Social model of Employability can help us to boost our employability.

To be able to identify and realise career opportunities we need to take in consideration 3 dimensions:

1. Personal Adaptability: those willing and able to change particular aspects of themselves to meet the needs of the context, gaining the experience and developing the skills are needed. It is important to consider key ingredients like the optimism self-belief and internal locus of control ( you have control over what happens to you). 
2. Career Identity: it is not so much what you have done in the past, as what you make of these experiences. It encompasses past, present and future, comparing yourself between who you are now and who you want to be and what you need to be doing in the future. This helps you to see the gaps between the 2 selves and to work out what they need to do or how they need to change or adapt. 
3. Social and Human Capital: Social capital is your network of potential helpful people. It is not just the people you know but more a measure of the way that those people feel towards you and the lengths they are willing and able to go to help. Human Capital is your ability to actually do the job at hand.

 Applying this model of Employability in practice: John´s career change

John is facing redundancy after working for more than 15 years for the same employer in similar job roles. When using this framework we need to see how is he doing in these 3 dimensions mentioned above:

• His personal adaptability will be his capacity of seeing alternatives, to avoid becoming trapped in rigid thinking. John is quite scared to push himself to try something new and this fear will be limiting his thinking. He feels trapped and without any viable alternatives. We can propose  a few exercises, one is  imagining they are some else they admire and how this person would respond to their current dilemma. 
• As his career identity has become so fixed on what he has been doing in finance for the last 15 years we can propose to him to focus on pivotal moments in his life or when they were particularly satisfying. He can also map out what key events would he like to have in 10 years time
• Regarding human capital; John is not really clear on what he wants to do next. Instead of focusing on identifying job descriptions and analysing his know-how, we will be focusing on strengths or self-awareness exercises that focus on interests. Once we have more clarity on all of these 3 areas we will be able to test his social network. John is also worried that he´s not very well-connected and that he needs to work on rebuilding his social network. 

As you have seen, employability according to this model is not based in 3 separate dimensions but on a combination of all three. That is why it is so important to keep working on those 3 dimensions, not only when you face a redundancy process or  a burn out situation. Asking yourself the following questions can help you out:

How are you on these 3 dimension levels? How do you feel about your level of optimism, self-confidence and resilience? 

This post was produced taking in consideration Dr Julia Yates course material on Career Development Theories in Practice at the Career Development Institute ( CDI UK). If you would like to expand on this topic you can check Psycho-Social model of Employability ( Fugate, Kinich and Ashforth)