Episode 1. Introductions - Welcome to Office Hours!

Episode Description

In this kickoff episode of Office Hours at The Alignment Lab, we launch the podcast and introduce our first mini-series on career development, focused on how to approach it in practice.

This episode also sets the stage for the series ahead, which examines a central question: where does responsibility for career development really sit? You’ll hear how this tension shows up across individuals, managers, and organizations – and what it might take to navigate it more intentionally.

Before diving into the series, we unpack how “career” and “career development” have evolved over time – shaped by cultural, economic, and social forces – and why definitions and expectations can vary so widely.

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References

Wilson, F. (2013, May 31). The Creation of the National Vocational Guidance Association. National Career Development Association (NCDA). ⁠https://www.ncda.org/aws/NCDA/page_template/show_detail/74076?model_name=news_article⁠

Savickas, M. L. (Ed.). (2013). Ten ideas that changed career development. National Career Development Association (NCDA). ⁠https://www.ncda.org/aws/NCDA/asset_manager/get_file/71112?ver=29242#:~:text=A%20field%20of%20practice%20emerges,a%20journal%20beginning%20in%201911 ⁠

Wang, D., & Li, Y. (2024). Career construction theory: tools, interventions, and future trends. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1381233. ⁠https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1381233 ⁠

Baskin, K. (2023, June 13). To keep employees, focus on career advancement. MIT Sloan School of Management. ⁠https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/to-keep-employees-focus-career-advancement⁠

Arulmani, Gideon., Bakshi, A. J., Leong, F. T. L., & Watts, A. G. (Eds.). (2014). Handbook of Career Development: International Perspectives (1st ed. 2014.). Springer New York. ⁠https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9460-7 

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Music: "Feel Good (Instrumental Version)" by PØW⁠ via Epidemic Sound

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Episode Transcript

Hey, y’all. Welcome to Office Hours at the Alignment Lab, where we explore what it really takes to align values, strategy, and behavior at work. I’m Hannah Yung-Boxdell, an organizational psychology practitioner, strategist, and systems architect. In Office Hours, we take an honest look at the human side of work and offer practical takeaways for evaluating what matters, what doesn’t, and how to focus our attentions accordingly. Whether you’re mid-career or in the executive suite,

The things you’ll hear about in Office Hours can build careers and organizations that are effective, resilient, and aligned with what matters most to you.

Hey, y’all. Welcome to Office Hours at the Alignment Lab, where we explore what it really takes to align values, strategy, and behavior at work. I’m Hannah Yung-Boxdell, an organizational psychology practitioner, strategist, and systems architect. In Office Hours, we take an honest look at the human side of work and offer practical takeaways for evaluating what matters, what doesn’t, and how to focus our attentions accordingly. Whether you’re mid-career or in the executive suite,

The things you’ll hear about in Office Hours can build careers and organizations that are effective, resilient, and aligned with what matters most to you.

Hello, we are kicking off this podcast with a short series of episodes on the topic of career development. And how can you, whether you’re an individual contributor, manager or leader, approach career development in a practical sense? Before we dive fully into it, I just wanna take a moment to welcome you to Office Hours. Full disclosure, this is my first podcast and I thought I would take a couple of minutes to introduce it.

My primary purpose with this podcast always is to offer practical value. We will cover a wide range of topics related to work, workplaces, workers, and factors that impact organizational occurrences, practices, and reality. My focus is never just the topics themselves, but how do people actually operationalize these concepts and practices successfully?

So as a practitioner of industrial organizational psychology, FYI, you may hear me slip up and refer to this simply as IO, but as a practitioner of IO psychology, I like to root what we discuss here in scientific study. As we know and love it, science is a systematic evidence-based process of discovery, testing, and refinement. So by definition though, science doesn’t have all the answers.

It’s a methodology of finding answers that make sense, are reliable, et cetera. So given that, and as a scientist practitioner, I’ll just say, of course, I love science. It’s super useful, beneficial, fascinating. And also with all due respect and adoration for the scientific method, I just want to say upfront that scientific study is not the only basis of knowledge.

More broadly, even Western epistemologies, a cornerstone of which is the scientific method, is not the only way to know something. And I think we just have to leave room for that. I say it so that we can create some space and leave room for that, else we risk overlooking or excluding the knowledge and perspectives that haven’t made it into, for instance, the hallowed halls of funded research and reputable journals.

So on this podcast, though I will do my best to introduce topics and root discussions using evidence, in office hours, you will hear perspectives based both in science and lived experience.

I will be doing this through a combination of solo episodes, like this one, and episodes where I host guests for a conversation. And as I said at the top, I am new here, so things may evolve and change over time. That said, the focus of solo episodes will often be to help introduce a concept or a topic, or perhaps recap and unpack a series.

By contrast, guest episodes are, as I’m sure you can imagine, about tapping into the expertise and experience of some amazing folks. I will do my best to flag, tag, whatever these accordingly once I figure out how to do that. I will also do my best to provide references in the episode notes for resources that I have used in preparation for an episode or series, or that may crop up in conversations.

The latter might be a little more difficult, so bear with me, but I will be doing my best. And you can expect episodes bi-weekly, that’s every two weeks, not twice a week, on Tuesdays. Okay, so if anyone is still listening and this sounds good to you, I am extremely excited that you’re here.

And let’s get into it.

So the subject and study of career development has a long history, which can be and has been approached from a variety of facets, such as adaptability, guidance, alignment, which you may see that referred to as fit or congruence in the research literature, and even social justice. In fact, related to this last one, I think it’s worth mentioning that the field of career development, initially called vocational guidance, has been tied to social and political reform movements from its inception in the early 20th century.

But first, in the interest of getting on the same page, I just want to take a moment to orient ourselves conceptually. Before we can talk about developing careers, what do we mean by career, right? The concept of career is a complex phenomenon.

Arulmani and colleagues referenced in the notes lay out the web of factors nicely when they discuss the manifestation of career in their 2014 Handbook of Career Development. They explain how large scale factors such as industrialization, colonization, modernization, and more recently globalization have impacted and shaped people’s orientations towards work.

They also point out that because these factors have not been universally experienced or experienced during the same time across the globe, there can be significant cultural and contextual differences in orientations to work. So in the interest of time, I am oversimplifying. So in a Western context, the industrial revolution changed work from a set of tasks focused on a single craft maybe that people performed, often for a lifetime, to something that could be performed as a means for achieving personal growth and potentially their position in society.

So with this enters the concept of career, which generally refers to a personal relationship with work, including the act of choice, consideration of personal suitability for that career, specialization, and ongoing potentially lifelong development.

By the early 20th century, the concept of and the support for guidance in finding and navigating such a career has taken root. Now, I live in the United States and even for a single country, we have a lot of variety in the way people here relate to their work, which is influenced as it is anywhere by a range of factors. It can be psychological factors, cultural factors, geographic or regional factors and economic factors.

So for instance, the way a farmer thinks about her career may differ from an accountant or a doctor, all other things being equal. They’re in the same rural community. They have the same or similar ⁓ cultural background. all of those things, right? All those things being equal. The language used, the parameters for their thinking,

The focus for even considering career development can vary between contexts, right? So in one setting, career development may focus on guidance to find a career field based on individual abilities and characteristics given a changing labor market. In another context, the field may be set and the focus may be on determining additional skills to develop in order to remain competitive in that market.

So all’s to say where people land in terms of orienting to the idea of career can actually be viewed as a spectrum. So on top of that development, right, can also refer to an array of things, anything from, for instance, guidance to advancement.

Additionally, I think it’s also worth noting it can be a little bit confusing that the term career development can refer to both the process of development, so the process that influences individual career behavior and change, but it can also refer to the various interventions that may be used to spur and support that very process of change.

Okay. So with that very, very brief primer, in this series, we will be examining career development from a particular lane or question, if you will.

Many folks grapple with tension around ownership.

And what I mean by that are the differing opinions around the question of whose responsibility is career development, right? Is it the sole purview of the individual? What’s the role that we can expect organizations and managers to play? And most of us would probably say it’s somewhere in the middle.

But ask anyone and you’ll find their expectations vary in terms of where the middle is or what actually takes place there, right? So the next four episodes will feature guests who will help to unpack, examine and offer their thoughts on how to approach career development from a different angle.

We’ll discuss self-directed development with a long-time career coach who has helped many clients navigate intentional career changes. In another week, we’ll hear from a talent management expert on the ways that managers can approach and support career development of their direct reports. We’ll also get to hear some insights from an academic researcher on recent research and potential implications and practical ideas for applied settings. And last, we’ll explore career development from a systems lens, such as how people can design and foster systems of support within and for their organizations.

Now, just before this, I mentioned that the orientation towards the idea of career development can range widely due to a number of factors. And I just wanna call out that for this series, I am speaking largely to experts who work in desk-based roles, often with a computer, typically involving mental more than physical labor. That doesn’t mean these conversations are only useful for listeners in these types of roles, but I did want to call it out.

So that’s the plan. But as Mr. Tyson taught us, that’s all well and good until we get hit in the mouth. Regardless of what comes our way though, I am very excited to get this series and this podcast launched. And if you have any, I’d love to hear your thoughts or questions.

Until next time, stay curious.