Culture Affects Career and Life Planning

Culture Affects Career and Life Planning

07 December 2008

By Richard N. Bolles

How young people make career choices varies widely in different countries. A career expert surveys these various standards exclusively for eJournal USA.

Richard N. Bolles is the author of What Color Is Your Parachute?, a guide to job hunting and career choice that has been reprinted in 10 editions over the last 30 years and translated into more than 20 languages.

Let’s start with a story.

Imagine, if you will, a beautiful valley, filled with every kind of fruit tree. You are told that you may choose any tree in that valley, and its fruit will be yours. To aid you in your choice, a little table is set up at the entrance to the valley, where you may taste the various fruits to see which one you most prefer. When your tasting is finished, you point to one fruit you’ve decided is your favorite. They lead you down the valley until you are looking at this beautiful tree. “That is your tree,” they tell you.

You should be thrilled, but instead your heart falls because the lowest-hanging fruit is at least 20 feet (seven meters) above the ground. Though you may in theory have the fruit you chose, in fact you cannot reach it.

You resign yourself to the frustration that your favorite fruit is forever beyond your reach, or you devise some plan for attaining it.

First you try to knock down some of the fruit by throwing rocks at the lowest branches of the tree. When that approach is not successful, you try another. You get several of your friends together, and they form a living pyramid, standing on each other’s shoulders, then hauling you up, like an acrobat, to the very top of this human pyramid where you will be able to reach the fruit. But the friends are unsteady, and the pyramid beneath you soon begins to crumble. You come up with one last idea. You take out a book from the library, and with the advice and practical help of those same friends, you learn to build a 30-foot (nine-meter) wooden or bamboo ladder. Once built, it can be carried from one spot to another beneath the tree, and you can pick the lovely fruit you so desire.

Once you have the fruit in hand, you exit the valley at the other end, where there is an inspector to ascertain if the fruit is really yours before you are allowed to keep it.

You may have guessed that this is a parable or allegory, designed to help us picture the approach to career pursuit in the United States, with its four stages:

1. The choice of a career that pleases you. This is represented by the fruit tasting at the entrance to the valley.

2. The job hunt. This is represented by the fact that you cannot reach that fruit at first. Here is our principal truth in this article: Career choice without job-hunting skills is “fruitless.” They are two parts of one indivisible whole. Without job-hunting skills, career choice is only a dream. Without a career choice, job hunting is no more than drifting. Drifting or dreaming: These are the consequences of mastering only one side of the career hunt as it is pursued in the United States.

3. The various methods of job hunting. These are represented by the rocks, the human pyramid, and the ladder. Favored job-hunting methods in the United States are the sending out of resumes (throwing rocks at the tree, hoping to shake some of the fruit to the ground); networking (building a human pyramid in order to reach the fruit); and/or empowerment, becoming a competent job hunter forever by using the present crisis to learn how to deal with this kind of crisis for the rest of your life. You’ll achieve that by inventorying your skills, learning to provide evidence of those skills, and then identifying the needs of targeted employers (this is represented by the building of a permanent ladder).

4. Successfully passing the interview with a prospective employer. This is represented, in our parable, by the inspection station at the exit from the valley at the far end.

With this parable about the U.S. careers system as our background, let’s see how the process of career choice and the job hunt (one indivisible topic) diverges from this model in other countries around the world.

Keep in mind that in every country this process is like a rainbow. We may select or discuss a dominant color in that country, but the other colors are always present in one degree or another. Hence, claiming that any country has just one method of going about career choice or the job hunt is ridiculous; there are usually as many exceptions as there are “rules.” We can speak only in terms of dominant assumptions, tendencies, or trends, and these frequently occur only among some social classes in that particular country.

Keeping these caveats in mind, let us catalog what variations there are around the world. Let us look at the rainbows.

Career choice. Around the world, some people will just “fall into” a career by accident or happenstance, hence “career choice” is not something highly valued or expected; in such cultures, young people do not know what they want, nor do they have the perspective to even frame the question to themselves. While at the other end of our rainbow, in some countries career choice is certainly expected, but the whole family chooses what career you will be pointed toward. It is a communal choice, not an individual one -- based on what will gain the greatest prestige, or “face,” for the family as a whole. (In many cultures, “face” refers to a family or individual’s reputation or standing in society.) It is worth noting that societies that do not use the vocabulary of “face” often base their career-choice system upon the concept nonetheless: Does a certain career automatically earn respect and confer admirable social standing upon the individual or family? Typically, engineer, doctor, and professor are at the top, while entrepreneur and politician are at the bottom. Individual choice is constrained by such considerations.

The job hunt. In some cultures, or at least amidst certain classes, there is little choice as to how you go about your job hunt. The method of the job hunt is prescribed and even ritualistic: “There is an order to things; this is the way it’s done.” In Northern Ireland, for example, the law requires that for certain state jobs every candidate has to be asked exactly the same questions. In other countries, the ritual may not have all the status of law but may be a heavily prescribed expectation. In some Latin or South American countries, for example, you are expected to deliver to companies that are of interest a package, running up to 10 pages or more, in advance of an interview. This package should include a three- to five-page résumé (sometimes longer), educational records, certifications, photocopies of diplomas, letters of recommendation from previous employers, etc. The point is to provide credibility — “I am who I say I am” — before companies even ask for such evidence. Some cultures (as in Europe) have an almost indestructible belief that the job-hunting system functions in a well-ordered, prescribed way — even when there is a ton of evidence that this simply is not true. Even much of the United States is not immune to this delusion.

The various methods of job hunting. At the other end of this job-hunting rainbow, in the United States and countries with similar latitude, you can use any method of job hunting that occurs to you. If you invent a new method tomorrow that nobody has ever heard of, more power to you. There are no limits, apart from avoiding weirdness and bad taste. In What Color Is Your Parachute?, I identify 16 different methods of job hunting, but the three most common methods are those alluded to in our allegory earlier: résumés, networking, and empowerment. Unlike the allegory, however, these are often not alternatives, but are all used simultaneously in pursuit of success in any particular case.

Successfully passing the interview with a prospective employer. The rainbow here is impressive. The outstanding difference, however, revolves around whether the interview and the job are perceived in terms of the group or perceived in terms of the individual. In the United States, we are accustomed to the emphasis being upon the individual. The individual is the subject of the hiring interview, at which time the individual must say what makes him or her outstanding, compared to other job hunters with similar backgrounds. The individual must describe and document the results he or she achieved in previous jobs or roles. The individual must, in the end, ask for the job and later decide which job offer to accept.

In many, many countries around the world, this is a totally foreign process, particularly in those cultures where the family is a dominant social force. In these countries, the emphasis is on the importance of the community, the group, and the team, both at work and in the interview.

For openers, the community may be present in the interview, with the entire family coming to the interview (in some Asian cultures or Maori). Their role is to volunteer things about you that you may have forgotten to mention or that humility may dictate you not say about yourself. As the process advances, the role of family members is to decide which position and firm you should accept, based on which offers the most “face” to the family.

The community is the subject of the interview. It is not the individual who accumulates achievements -- only the group or the team. Indeed, in some cultures, in order for the team to function at its highest, employers may only consider hiring everyone from the same city or community to be sure they will work well together.

As job hunter, your role in the interview is to emphasize what you contributed to the team or group you worked with in the past. More than this -- that is, trying to stand out from the other members of the group -- is regarded as arrogance. In Japan, this prohibition is enshrined in the adage “hit the nail that stands above the rest, so they all are even”; while in Australia and New Zealand, this is referred to as “the tall poppy gets cut first.” Ouch!

You are advised instead to speak of your assets only in terms of “added value,” a term that almost every employer understands.

Now that we have seen how the process of “career choice and the job hunt” varies in countries around the world, I see four lessons for someone who is about to head down this road:

1. Take inventory of yourself. Know yourself as well as you possibly can. (See exercises in What Color Is Your Parachute? or similar works.) Decide what transferable skills you have, particularly what skills you could contribute to a team or community of workers.

2. Using the Internet, the phone book, or conversations with people who work in your field of interest, find out as much as you can about companies or organizations where you might like to work. If you know more about that company than other job seekers, you’ll make a good impression when you get an interview. Companies love to be loved.

3. Familiarize yourself with how the job hunt is typically done in the land where you are seeking work. Talk to several people who have found jobs there, and ask how they did it. Take notes.

4. Go deeper. Ask people whom they know who didn’t follow the typical path but found work they enjoyed doing anyway. Talk to them face-to-face, if you can, and ask how they did it. Take note of all the details so you can devise a “Plan B” in case the typical path in that country doesn’t work for you.

What you want, more than any job, is hope for your future and in your life. And in job hunting, as in life, hope is born from always having alternate ways of pursuing your search for purpose and meaning on this earth.

Further information about job hunting is available at the author’s Web site http://www.jobhuntersbible.com/

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Bolles, R. N. (2008, December 07). IIP Digital | U.S. Department of State. Retrieved from http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/publication/2008/12/20081210084227cmretrop5.685061e-02.html#axzz42Kxr2ta1