Enhance Your Career and Employability Skills - Understanding your values

What are career values?

• Values are a way of describing what is important to you about your work.
• They are linked to the rewards you get from your work, the contributions you want to make within your work and the meaning that your work has for you.
• They represent needs that you have that might be satisfied by your work.
• Values drive your motivation and your behaviour. If you value something highly, you will put in more effort, make bigger sacrifices and overcome bigger obstacles in order to obtain it.
• Some of our innate values will come from our personalities, from our parents, our upbringing and our cultural background. Other values may emerge or develop over time as a result of our experiences.

What are the benefits of thinking about values?

• Clear values help you to ask the right questions. If you know what is important to you for your future career, you can gather specific and relevant information about your career options rather than relying on what other people think might be important.
• Clear values help you to make difficult decisions. If you know what is important, you can balance appropriately all the factors that might determine your future career success and satisfaction. This means you are less likely to make decisions you regret in your career.
• Clearer values help you to cope better with change and uncertainty. If you know what is important, you can make decisions and take actions even when you don’t have all the information you would like or if the outcomes are uncertain. Clear values can act as a compass.
• Clear values help you to make strong impressions. If you have a clear sense of what is important, it is much easier to express that to other people. This helps them to understand you faster and helps you to have more impact in social situations.
• Clear values help you to understand other people’s values. If you know what is important to you, it increases your understanding of what is important to others, both individuals and organisations. This will help you to anticipate potential fit or conflict between your values and other values. Being aware of any conflict between an organisation’s values and your own can help you to make better choices about whether to stay or leave.
• Clear values help you to be proactive in shaping your role. If you have clearly aligned motivations, you can more readily adapt yourself to suit your role and adapt your role to suit you, whilst still providing benefits to your organisation. 

How do you know what is important?

• Some of your values may be conscious and explicit, which means you can articulate your values if someone asks you what they are. Try the What Am I Like? exercise to explore how many of your values are conscious and explicit.
• Other values may be implicit or unconscious and may be revealed by your behaviours, your responses to the things that happen to you and the choices you make.
• To increase your chances of obtaining the benefits of clearer values, you need to make as many of your values as possible conscious and explicit.
• You need to be able to reflect on your experiences in order to convert implicit values into explicit values.
• People sometimes have difficulty identifying their values because
• they have not had a sufficient range of experiences in order to reveal their implicit values
• they haven’t reflected sufficiently on their experiences in order to recognise their implicit values
• Our emotions are signals about whether or not our needs are being met. Negative emotions are linked with unmet needs and positive emotions with met needs. Therefore, our emotional responses to different situations can reveal our needs and, so our values.