Copyright The Careers Group, University of London [Date of this version: 09 May 2014]

The Careers Group believes that all information is correct at the time of publication.
Understanding your career 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.
See Video 1.4 for details of various career value frameworks that have been developed by theorists and researchers.



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 dont 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 peoples 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 organisations 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
o they have not had a sufficient range of experiences in order to reveal their implicit values
o they havent 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.
Exercises linked to video 1.3 help to develop the exploration and reflection skills needed to reveal and recognise implicit
values.

Copyright The Careers Group, University of London [Date of this version: 09 May 2014]
The Careers Group believes that all information is correct at the time of publication.
How important is it?
Values are relative not absolute. You only know how valuable something is to you by comparing it to something else.
o Compare one value against another value. Knowing the relative importance of your various values helps you to
make complex evaluations about conflicting career options, especially in situations where some values are
strongly met by one set of options and very different values are met by the other options. You may also want
to compare the values that drive you in your work with the values that you demonstrate in other aspects of
your life.
o Comparing past, present and future values. It helps to be aware of how your values might be changing over
time, so that you do not make decisions about the future based on things that are going to be less important in
the future. Some of your values will have a longer-term scope than others. However, change situations often
drive us to focus on short-term needs.
o Compare your values with other peoples values. As you interact with a wide range of people and think about
how your reactions to various situations are similar to or different from theirs, you become more aware of how
important certain things are to you.



Why is it important?
Difficulties can occur in career decision making if you only focus on the surface wants rather than trying to identify the
deeper needs linked to those wants.
The danger in dealing only with the surface wants is that you may end up not really satisfying your underlying need
through your career choices.
Being aware of underlying needs can make you more creative and flexible in how you satisfy those needs through your
work.
Some of the most commonly expressed wants in relation to careers are:
o Money
o Promotion
o Worklife balance
Quite often these wants are surface substitutes for more fundamental human needs, such as:
o Security and stability
o Status and power
o Freedom and autonomy
o A sense of control
o Feeling valued by others
o Maintaining important relationships
o Having a sense of purpose and authenticity