Help your students develop their own career compass

App developers, social media managers, drone pilots, sustainability consultants, AI ethicists, cloud architects, influencers and content creators – what do all these job titles have in common? Answer: most either did not exist, or were too niche to be considered mainstream jobs, just 20 years ago. Forecasting future careers is difficult. Technological, economic, social and political impacts can make career journeys more non-linear than ever before.

From a career practitioner point of view, equipping students with the skills needed for jobs that don’t exist yet is in essence teaching them how to take ownership of their career development. To do so, we must give them the ability to identify their own career compass, and how they can skillfully navigate their career journeys in the sea of endless possibilities (and uncertainties).

Know your vocational self-concept

Jobs are now an amalgamation of interdisciplinary skill demands, fluid boundaries and hybrid roles, shaped by technological advancement and organisational changes. In this climate, the ability to understand yourself deeply and recognise your vocational self-concept is now a crucial and valuable skill. Vocational self-concept helps individuals understand that the way they view themselves, their abilities and their values influences their career decisions. It gives them an understanding of where they may fit in the job market, and helps them develop soft skills that align with their personality.

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The RIASEC model, developed by the psychologist John Holland, offers a framework that can help individuals define their vocational self-concept. Although it was developed for 20th-century needs, it is still commonly used as a strong research base in many careers assessments. It suggests that people choose careers that express their inward personalities, and identifies six personality environment types: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising and conventional (RIASEC). When your vocational personality is matched with a work environment, you experience greater satisfaction and performance in your career. This alignment is known as the “people-environment fit”.

For example, an undergraduate studying IT discovered that his top three RIASEC codes were investigative, realistic and social. Under the guidance of career coaches, they defined his vocational self-concept as someone who enjoys solving problems (investigative), building working solutions (realistic) and making technology meaningful for people (social). Together, they can discover ways to best express his personality in suitable work environments, present and future, and, at the same time, hone the transferable skills that allow him to cross sectors and industries.

A person’s vocational self-concept can evolve over their lifetime. Implementing an individual’s evolving self-concept through work roles is a lifelong process.

The model can also be useful in cases where someone finds themselves in a job where their work environment no longer aligns with their type. For example, an art teacher, whose dominant codes are artistic and social, could tap into their core skills such as creativity, empathy and communication, and pivot into roles such as an art therapist, architect or yet-to-be created roles that combines these skills.

Instead of pigeonholing themselves into specific job roles, understanding their artistic and social personality type could widen their perspectives in considering possible career alternatives, especially when traditional jobs disappear and future jobs emerge.

How we use the framework

At the Singapore Institute of Technology, the Centre for Career Readiness encourages students to use the free Holland assessment on its SkillsFuture portal to discover their RIASEC codes.

We also encourage them to consult their career coaches to further explore their career interests, using Holland’s RIASEC, and to develop skill sets relevant to their career interests during their time at university. To further aid students in identifying core transferable skills, we developed the Industry-Ready Skills Framework, where students can use to help develop transferable skills in a structured manner. This framework helps students deepen their understanding of self and acquire skills through curricular and non-curricular activities.

On graduation, students receive a record of the transferable skills they’ve achieved. By integrating their RIASEC personality insights with the Industry-Ready Skills Framework, they gain clarity about how their natural inclinations align with industry needs. We hope that this will help them to intentionally chart their skills development in ways that are authentic to their personality and relevant to their career aspirations, and to be mindful, agile career artisans on their career journey.

While jobs may evolve, people’s underlying personality types and their relationship to work environments are likely to persist. The RIASEC framework can be seen as a lens for fostering career adaptability, resilience and lifelong learning in one’s career development – essential traits that one hopes to see in students.

In our world of work, defined by emerging technologies and higher demands for interdisciplinary fields, it can be a powerful tool to guide career exploration, advancement and adaptation. Honing the skill of constant reflection on their vocational self-concept through the RIASEC model becomes their career compass to navigate the unknown jobs of the future.

Our advice to academics or career counsellors is to make career assessment tools, such as the RIASEC profiling tool, accessible to all students at the early stages of their tertiary education. This provides students with a shared career compass “language” to begin reflecting on their vocational self-concept and whether it matches their intended career path.

Introducing this tool early in their educational journey is essential because it allows students ample opportunity to explore and develop their vocational self-concept during their time in tertiary education. Career counsellors and coaches should receive proper training and education to interpret these results, enabling them to help students identify promising career opportunities during consultations.

Natalie Feng and Randford Joseph Tay are both career educators at the Centre for Career Readiness at the Singapore Institute of Technology.

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