Hello and welcome to the job hunting podcast. And if you’re new here and this type of content is important to you, remember to subscribe to this show. And please know that we also have a newsletter. It’s a weekly email that goes straight into your inbox with the week’s episode plus. Exclusive content just for the subscribers.
Things like invitations to events, special discounts, etc. So go to the website and sign up. There’s a link in the episode show notes or you can find the Job Hunting podcast um, using Google. It’s easy. Today, we’re going to use a concept from research to help guide your process in finding the best career progression for you.
It’s called grounded theory. But don’t worry, I’m going to explain to you in simple terms and show you how this approach can be helpful and very powerful in helping you uncover your career purpose and things that you want to do in life, not just career, you can use this for anything really. Um, And it’s a way of DIYing career counseling.
I spoke about the difference between career counseling and career coaching at the last episode. That’s episode 257. And then it gave me this idea of talking to you about grounded research. For those of you that have been following for a while, if you missed guest episodes, Please know that I have a few coming up and I wanted to let you know, like, if you’ve been listening, I know that when you’re job searching or when you’re really interested in career advancement, career progression, you listen to episodes every week.
Thank you so much for trusting me with this valuable time that you have, that you could be doing something else and you. with me. I cannot believe this is happening to me. It’s, you know, so, so important to my business and to me that you chose to spend this time listening to what I have to say. So I have been, um, scheduling, scheduling guest episodes and they are coming up soon.
I just wanted to let you know who I’m talking to and what it’s all about. So there will be an episode with an HR consultant and her expertise is helping employees with restructures. Yes, that’s right. We’re going to talk to someone whose day to day job is helping employers do layoffs and do redundancies.
And I think this is super important for me personally as a career coach, but also for you as a job seeker to get to know the other side and how they operate and how the way they think. I’m also interviewing a couple of recruiters. Um, I’m also interviewing a Harvard academic. to talk about career development and I think you’re going to really enjoy these discussions.
So I’ve been curating people that I think will be exceptionally good for the type of audience that I, that I work for, which are job seekers, corporate professionals, people with experience that find themselves either needing a new job or wanting a new job. So, sign up for the newsletter, you too, if you’ve been listening for a while and you’re still not signed up because then this will be the best way for you to get a reminder when these episodes come up and, you know, in the meantime, you have me and I’ll tell you a little bit about my week and my day.
I wasn’t planning to tell you about my day. I, um, actually have had quite a difficult day today because the camera just wouldn’t work. And can you believe that I bought a new laptop just because the camera wasn’t working only to find out. with a brand new laptop that the camera was still not working and today I just decided that’s it.
I need to fix this and it was the USB, um, what is it called? If you’re on YouTube, I’m about to show you something. It’s the trap, the hub, the USB hub, not this one. We ended up buying several to see which one would not have this glitch. Um, And we, we opened a different box and it worked well. And the help that I had was actually a good brand, but it was causing this glitch all the time when I was on Zoom with my clients, or when I was recording episodes like this.
Ah, finally! I can’t believe I spent a lot of money with a new laptop and it’s not the laptop, it’s It’s the camera and it’s not the camera, it’s the hub. I thought the old laptop, the USB hub, was damaged. Anyway, it’s an old laptop. I’m glad that I upgraded. It’s all fine. But basically, I spent all morning and half the afternoon and you know how you feel like when you had this day planned and now it’s gone out the window you’re not going to achieve either i’m not going to achieve everything that i had planned to do today or i’m going to be working very late which as i get older i just don’t want to do anymore i feel like i could but i just Should not you know you can but you shouldn’t and that’s where I’m at today.
I need to figure it out It’s 2 30 in the afternoon And I will definitely not meet all my goals And it made me think about the importance when I’m planning my week to always allow for white space This is something that I learned when I worked in a think tank because we needed white space Throughout the year basically 50 percent of our schedule in the year was white space was white space.
And I was like, this is so clever, so important. It was absolutely necessary because it was a think tank where politicians would come to give speeches and, you know, introduce white papers and ideas, either publicly, Um, which would then be picked up by the news or confidentially, we would invite some industry leaders and they would have some confidential Chatham House rule events so that they could share ideas of, you know, policies that they were hoping to implement.
So you can’t, you can’t plan for that. You never know when politicians will reach out to you and want to do those, those things. And since then, I’ve been very, very good up until recently at maintaining a lot of white space in my calendar. I think it’s because I’ve been quite unwell with a very bad cold that just lingered forever that now everything seems to be jammed up.
But even as I recover from a cold, I mean, I hope that you. I’m not just rambling here for my own benefit. I hope that you can take some of this for yourself as well. Sometimes we come back from a holiday, for example, and we jam pack everything, or we’re about to go on a holiday, we jam pack everything just before we go.
It doesn’t work like that. You need the white space because you never know, um, and things will just happen that are completely outside of your control. So keep that in mind. Learn from my mistakes. This is a coaching week for me. So if you’re new here or you haven’t paid attention, I coach clients every other week.
And then I have a jam packed day. So today, uh, was basically four LinkedIn audits that I had to do, which is like, For, I mean, it’s like six hours of work at least, if not more, probably around seven hours, plus a coaching session later today. Um, tonight actually, because I, I coach at all times of the day and this episode that I’m recording for next week.
So, you know, um, the LinkedIn audits won’t get all done. I just will need to let, Clients know that there will be delays with that, but, um, yeah, coaching week is usually jam packed. It’s usually 10 to 12 hours of work every day for me. And then every other week when I’m not coaching, it’s a more creative week, either that or I’m working with corporate clients.
So if I’m working with corporate clients, it could be quite busy, not as busy as coaching week. Um, And it’s all it’s it’s I chose that and I like that and I often tell my friends who are coaches that I think this every other week coaching jam packed week is actually really good because you are in the right frame of mind for coaching.
You’re not coming in and out of the coaching mode in your brain. It’s really interesting. So I’m either coaching people with consultations that I do on zoom or I’m doing LinkedIn audits. Um, Which is just me recording a video that I didn’t get to send to my clients. But, um, yeah, I’m in coaching mode and it really helps me.
It gets me into gear. I’m always so, you know, a day like this where I have problems, technical problems, it’s frustrating. But it’s all right. Um, it’s supposed to be a holiday on Friday. I think I was trying too hard to give myself a holiday. Um, it’s a holiday only here in the state of Victoria. It’s grand final day, which is a weird holiday to celebrate.
You know, a footy game. Holidays in Australia are funny. We have Queen’s Birthday, now it’s a King’s Birthday. We have a holiday for a horse race, a holiday for the end of the season for football, which is very different from American football. Most of my listeners are in America, so I hope that educates you on how Australians holidays work.
All right, enough about all of the babble, um, and things happening in my life and let’s go into grounded research. Let’s start by explaining what grounded research is and why I think this is really beneficial way of DIY and career counseling for you. Let’s start with the basics. In academic terms, grounded research is a method where you gather information and analyze Let the patterns emerge, right?
So from those patterns that emerge, you build a theory or an explanation. I talk about patterns quite a lot in my episodes. I like the idea of finding patterns of success, removing patterns of failure from a career strategy, for example. I’m always working on that with my clients. But grounded theory takes at a, you know, a level up for sure.
Instead of starting with this fixed idea of what your career will look like, using grounded research allows you to get insight that comes from the data that you’re collecting. You know, the data in this case would be conversations that you’re having, meetings that you’re having, just you, you know, absorbing information through books or literature or, um, movies or conversations.
You might be thinking, what does that have to do with my career, Renata? What are you talking about? Well, here’s the thing. Many professionals who feel lost or stuck in their careers, they often struggle because they’re trying to figure out everything out in their heads. So they’re like in their heads, trying to figure out what’s going to happen.
They feel pressured to set big goals. They don’t want to talk to anybody until they figure it out, which is in this case here, I think it’s the biggest mistake. And they’re trying to force themselves into a plan that doesn’t quite fit. But what if you approached your career in this way of grounded research?
What if instead of Forcing a direction and working alone, you allowed your next steps to emerge from what’s already happening in your life and your career and just living your life intentionally and mindfully looking for those answers through conversations and through education. How can you apply the grounded research idea into your career?
Let’s look at how it can be done. Now, collecting data would be the first step. The first step would be you collecting data. So, when I have worked with, um, clients, uh, using this, uh, concept, we call the career coaching that we do a project. And we approach even the network of my clients as I’m, I’m, investigating, um, ideas for a project.
Sometimes they haven’t even left their jobs, or if they have, they’re calling that break a sabbatical and they are engaging in a project. Sometimes they will engage in a project because they’re considering writing a book or writing an article or starting a podcast or just, you know, Um, collating ideas for future work opportunities.
It really depends. But we sometimes would workshop how we are going to approach people so that they know that we’re collecting data. You don’t have to always let them know, but sometimes it might be interesting professionally to let them know. And this can be anything. Your You know, um, the, the collecting data can be from past job experiences.
So you identify the things you’ve done in the past and, you know, remembering them. Sometimes we forget and what people have said, um, about you doing performance management meetings, ad hoc conversations, feedback that you have received. Some of you may have done 360 degrees, um, uh, surveys as well. What you enjoy doing, you know, what frustrated you, um, in, in works that you have done in the past.
So, look for all these patterns in feedback from colleagues, managers, and even family, friends. If you’ve worked on projects that really energized you, take note of that. If certain tasks drain you, that’s valuable data as well. Pay attention to how you feel during different parts of your workday or you felt at different parts of your workday if you’re not working currently.
The key is not to rush anything. You don’t need to figure it all at once. You just need to sort of set yourself a time frame and think look for the next month, or three months, or six months. I’m just going to start noticing things and being more mindful and writing things down, collating these ideas so that I can find the patterns of things that I like and dislike, things I’m known for.
Just like grounded theory, you will be gathering all these bits of information without pressure to immediately form conclusions. And If you feel like you don’t have all of that information, go out to market, go out to your network, go out to people that have different jobs that you’re interested in and ask them about it.
You know, I like this idea of an internal, um, Um, collection of data and also an external collection of data, you know, ask people can I, can I have a word with you? I’d like to interview you. I’m considering writing an article or I’m considering doing a podcast or I’m just, trying to understand this better for my own professional benefit.
It could be that you’re interested in ESG or cybersecurity or AI or working for a different industry, a different sector, a different country, whatever it is, find people that are already there that have made the transition or have always worked in that field and talk to them. And, yeah, that usually is how we work.
The reason why I sometimes invite clients to consider introducing it as a project is because sometimes I have clients who are studying, so they are doing coaching with me, but also as active education or an MBA. The approach could be, you know, uh, that they’re doing this as part of an assignment. I, I have clients that are very good thought leaders and they write, like to write about topics so they might, you know, want to interview somebody so they get to know something better.
But sometimes it’s also okay just to ask them because you’re interested and curious for your professional development and future career progression. So it’s up to you. The second step would be to code all that information because if you gather a lot of information you need to look at that data that you’ve collected and start breaking it down into categories that are meaningful for you.
Um, in my group coaching program, On this week that we’re in now we’re in week three. I coach for those who don’t know I have clients that I coach as a group for seven weeks. I do that twice a year. We started in early September and we’re going to be working together until end of October and then I’ll do it again in February 2025.
But this week and next week we start coding our information and start developing those different categories, um, that allows them to start building. Blocks of. ideas that are meaningful to them and for their future career paths. So, for example, let’s say you’ve noted that in your last three jobs, the projects you loved most involved working directly with people.
Now, it could be the opposite of that. It could be that you’ve noticed that the projects that you or the work that you loved the most was the work that you were doing. independently and not working with people or not working in a matrix structure in an organization. Some people don’t like to work in the matrix, the structure, other people love it.
So you have to identify those patterns and maybe you need to realize that you thrive in certain types of environments and roles that give you More autonomy, more interactions with people, more work from the office, more work remotely, whatever it is.
Then the next step is start identifying recurring themes. Maybe it’s a particular set of skill, um, a type of work environment that suits you. Some people thrive in environments that are more structured and bureaucratic. Cough, cough, cough. Bureaucratic should not be a bad word. Bureaucratic is a type of organizational structure that suits a lot of people and a lot of types of work.
Government, for example, higher education. Some people feel much better in a much looser, flat structure like a startup. Other people just can’t stand it. It’s too uncertain for them. It, it seems risky for them. They don’t feel comfortable or, um, um, um, um, um, um. They don’t feel like they can thrive in that sort of environment.
So, those are sort of the patterns and the themes that you want to start identifying so that you can better understand what type of work will be beneficial for you. Then the next step, the third step, would be to categorize what matters most once you’ve gathered and you coded your insights. Because it could be that you might find that two things are very interesting but they might be quite opposite from each other.
So you need to rank them. So grouping those things together. For example, you might create a category like things that energize me, skills I’m naturally good at, values I want my work to reflect. By doing this, you’re beginning to see the patterns and gain clarity. And I also invite you to start thinking, okay, what is most important to me?
Let’s start ordering this and ranking them as well. You might notice, for example, that you value freedom and autonomy in your work, or the opposite of that. Or you might realize that you care deeply about making a tangible impact. Um, Others just, you know, want to do the task. They don’t really mind which type of organization they work for.
They just want to do that thing that they’re very good at. When these categories start to form, they’re like little clues that help you move forward in your career that will help you feel more aligned with who you are. So, For example, you could be doing an exercise like this, identifying all those patterns and then sitting down with a mentor or with a coach like me for an hour or two and then together, you know, identifying different options for your future career.
The next step, step four, building your career purpose. After you’ve categorized your insights, it’s time to start making sense of them. To build your own theory about what drives you in your career. This isn’t about setting the five year plan. It’s not about long term planning. It’s more about articulating the things that matter most to you right now.
Your career purpose can start with something simple. Like I want to work in environments that foster creativity, or I need to feel like my work is improving people’s lives in a meaningful way. Or it could be something like I need to be in a job where I’m managing a group of people because I really enjoy team management.
So from these emerging themes, you will begin to develop a better picture of where you want to go. And it’s not about forcing a rigid plan, but about letting your career direction naturally take shape from the data that you’ve collected about yourself. What I think works really well in this, um, way of developing, um, goals for yourself is to start from scratch.
I mentioned this last week on episode 257 and I will say this again, grounded theory really works when you are not biased as you collate the data, when you’re not worried about what people will think, what your parents will think, what your friends will think, you know, you’re being quite open minded and working with the real things that have happened to you in your career, the feedback that you have received, the information that you know about yourself, about what your strengths are, what your drivers are, and expanding that knowledge just by reflecting on them and by talking to people.
It’s okay to go to people that have worked with you in the past and ask them, you know, what were the things that you thought I did really well in my previous job? If you were going to talk to me about, you know, about the work that I did to somebody, how would you describe it? Sometimes this thing seems so, um, simple, but, you know, You will be surprised that they might see something about the work that you did that you may not haven’t identified yourself.
I always, uh, mention in this, uh, show that sometimes we normalize the things we’re good at and this is what I mean. So let people tell you what you’re good at and listen to their feedback. Alright, so what do we do next? You know, we’ve collated the data, we’ve categorised them, we’ve analysed them. Then it’s time to let purpose emerge.
You know, over time, one of the best things about applying grounded research to your career planning and design is that it’s an ongoing process. It’s not a finite process. You’re not locked into a goal or a path. As you gain more experience over time in future years and you reflect on what resonates with you, new patterns and new insight will emerge and you can continuously include that and start excluding a couple of things as well that Don’t feel quite right for you anymore.
I think our strengths, uh, they’re not set in stone, but we’re born with a certain preference for, you know, some, some strengths better than others. And that’s normal. We can work on developing our strengths even further or bringing some of them that are really low up to a higher level if we intentionally work on that.
But that takes much more work. I’d rather work with clients that are just comfortable with the strengths that they have and just making the most of them and building their personal brand around those. We use self reflection plus a strengths assessment that I love called Talent Predicts. It’s on my website.
If you want to do it, it’s there. You can purchase and do it and get a report. So we work on that and that’s fine. But you know what changes often is what drives you? Your career driver is your purpose. It will change because as you get older, um, things that were important to you as a young professional are not important anymore.
You know, you might have met some of the goals or you didn’t get to achieve some of the goals that you set up, so you want to reset your career, um, so the drivers change. And, um, I think that those new patterns and insights as they emerge, it’s important to acknowledge them, notice them, acknowledge them, and include them as part of your new path for your future career.
So if you feel lost or lacking in direction, try releasing the pressure to know exactly what you want and instead focus on observing what has already been happening and seeing Not only to you, but to others around you as well. So keep collecting that information from your work life and coding it. And eventually, your career purpose will begin to emerge.
I say this because Um, a lot of people when they, so I, I, I open enrollments for the group coaching program in August. Um, a lot of people look, like hundreds and hundreds of people look at that website over and over again. So they get an email from me and then they go to the website and then they don’t sign up.
Okay. So we have 25 people doing the program right now, but we have. I don’t know, 10 times that number of people that were really interested. Not people that just looked at the website once, people that came back to it time and time and time again. So if you go back to a website time and time, think about how you do online shopping, right?
You go back and you see that person. Those shoes and then you check in again and check in again. You really want it, but you don’t buy it. That’s what I think happens to people that are going through, um, a job search or a crossroad in their career. They’re not sure, you know, what to do, but they keep looking at the program and they decided not to sign.
And when I sent a survey around asking why they didn’t sign, a lot of them said, I didn’t feel I was ready. I didn’t feel I was ready. The whole purpose of the program is to make you ready. So I’m like, Oh, what is it that I can do to help people feel more ready, right? Or that they can sign up for this program and that that program will help them feel ready.
I think that we stay internalized is the loneliness of seeking career advancement by ourselves. And. Having to know all the answers before we talk to a coach, even before we go and look for a job. But I think that the grounded research idea, this concept will help you come out of your shell and start connecting with people and with yourself.
I mean, doing the self reflection first and then going into conversations with others and understanding that that is such an important part of the process. process of feeling ready. I’ve worked with, you know, so many clients who feel like they need to have all the answers. But when we shift the, um, the mindset, they often find that their purpose was much easier to find once they felt ready.
They could open up to people. They could open up and talk about what was going on with them. Those conversations can be so insightful. You know, to be in listening mode is so insightful. You just need the time and the space right to, to, to do it. You don’t even need a coach. You can just start it on your own.
So what are the next steps for you? I would suggest starting by looking at your career data. Right, so start by looking at what has happened in your career. Some, many of my clients, when they start working with me, they have done so many assessments, maybe that’s you. They have already done two or three different assessments.
They have 360, um, reports that they have received. And part of our sessions is spent just reassessing all of that. But you can do that on your own as well. You might want to take a week or two. You know, don’t think that you can do this on a Sunday afternoon. I often tell people that Sunday afternoons is probably the worst time to do things like this.
Um, just keep in mind that it’s a low energy time of the week and you probably will be much better off resting. Um, going to sleep early so that you can have a great week, um, but try to find some steady leave or carve out some space for you at a high energy time of your week or time of your day so that, look, maybe you are the sort of person who thrives on Sunday afternoon.
So don’t take my word for it. Sometimes, you know, people can, can operate quite differently and I totally get that. But identify this as a project for yourself. Find. the time, carve out the time, um, and jot it down. Jot it down. Don’t keep it in your head. This is so important. You can have a notebook for this.
You can use post it notes. I love doing post it notes when I’m Doing projects and planning and start sort of doing that process and do it for a specific time, right? So give yourself a month, two months, six months, it really depends on how much of, how much time you have and how much in a hurry you are as well.
If you’re not in a hurry, it can just be now part of your routine, just creating a discipline where you’re starting to think about this and being more, more observation mode from now on. From there you can begin to code and categorize things and over time you’ll have a clearer picture and remember that you don’t need to have all the answers today or tomorrow.
Start with where you are and let your career insights emerge naturally. And I hope that this is going to help you. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode. If you experiment with grounded research concept to identify your career goals and purposes and, and it makes a difference to you, Why don’t you write back to me?
I’d love to know. I hope that this discussion really brings that fresh perspective and a new way of thinking about, um, engaging in, in career, what I call career readiness. And, you know, if you’re feeling lost or unsure, I hope it provides you with a bit of an idea of what you can do to DIY, your career planning and design.
And if you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, share it with somebody that you think will enjoy this content as well. Leave a review for us if you’re on Apple Podcasts or another app that allows you to give you a review. And that’s it. That’s it for now. I look forward to seeing you next week with another great episode.
Bye. Have a great day.
