The happenstance approach for creating a satisfying life and career

We have all heard the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It embodies the traditional matching model for career selection. You are supposed to identify your abilities and interests and then match them to a career that requires those characteristics. From this perspective choosing a future career direction appears to be a logical and deliberate process. You choose the appropriate career goal and then work to acquire the necessary education and training. People are viewed as incomplete until they declare their future occupation and begin to pursue it. Indecision and chance are frowned upon. We think this matching model is unrealistic and outmoded.

The matching model might make sense if people had stable characteristics that fit only one occupation. But this is not the case. People are multifaceted and continually changing. Occupational opportunities are continually changing too. Any given occupation includes people with diverse backgrounds, personalities and talents. The matching model doesn’t fit the reality of people’s lives nor the constantly changing economic climate. Few people end up being employed in a job that they chose through a logical matching process. Instead, they are constantly adapting their occupational activities as the result of a long chain of unplanned events.

The Happenstance Approach

John Krumboltz, Professor of Education and Psychology at Stanford University, has come up with a new model for explaining career development that he calls the “Happenstance Learning Theory.” Its central premise is that you learn to initiate actions which generate unplanned but beneficial events. Some of the key ideas are as follows:

• Always keep your career options open
• Continue learning as long as you live
• Make it your goal to enjoy a satisfying life
• Deliberately take actions to create unplanned events with unexpected outcomes
• Use mistakes as a good way of learning
• Use every job as a way of learning new skills

An excellent introduction to the happenstance approach can be found in the book, “Luck is No Accident,” by Krumboltz and Levin (2004). The book is practical, humorous and filled with lots of real life examples from people's lives.


Inspired2Work – Taking Advantage of Happenstance

The goal of Inspired2Work is to help people create more satisfying lives by taking advantage of happenstance events. We want to encourage people to look at their lives and careers in a new way by providing educational programs and materials. We want to encourage people to experiment, explore and have fun. We don’t think it is necessary or even desirable to declare your occupational goal in advance. The question should not be, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It is more beneficial to ask, “What would be fun and helpful to try next?” Here are some of the things we are working on:

• The creation of the Inspired2Work video library which will include thousands of inspiring and informative videos about different occupations.
• The Celebrating Work Internship Program, where we introduce students to established professionals who collaborate with them in the creation of new career videos.
• The Corporate and Educational Seminar Program where participants will learn more effective methods of using the happenstance approach for creating a satisfying life and career.

The origins of Inspired2Work

The idea for Inspired2Work arose through what John Krumboltz might call "happenstance.” John, a professor of counseling psychology at Stanford University, has long been interested in finding ways to help people establish meaningful careers. His dream has been to create a way for people to explore different occupations, not just by reading about them, but by having the opportunity to do some of the work involved.

In the 1970’s John created educational materials called Job Experience Kits, which had activities related to different professions. For example, the carpenter kit included nails and wood and had you do some basic tasks related to framing. The kits were distributed by an educational publisher, and were well accepted in schools and counseling centers. In the late 1990’s, John continued working on his dream by developing the Virtual Job Experience, an immersive multimedia program that allowed you to see what it was like to work at a given job. His first prototype was about working as an advertising account executive. The resulting multimedia CD-ROM was a tremendous accomplishment. John, who is a natural story teller, designed the entire story board. The program is interesting, humorous and challenging. It gets you involved in tasks related to working as an account executive, like pitching proposals and doing market research. Unfortunately, the production costs were prohibitively expensive, and John was unable to raise the necessary funding to create the library of programs that he envisioned.

My consulting work focuses on educational technology, and I have been getting more and more interested in the ways that user contributed content can be used in education. One day, I was thinking about home made videos, and I wondered if they might provide a way to create career related content. I met with John and posed the following question. What if we could create a web site that had a library of thousands of amateur-made movies about different jobs—would this be something he would be interested in doing? It turns out that John is a movie hobbyist and has been making home videos for years. He immediately saw the power of using videos as an educational resource, and he liked the idea of focusing on user contributed content. We then began moving forward to make the idea a reality.

We ended up naming the web site Inspired2Work because it expresses the focus of our endeavor. Too many career related resources focus on information rather than inspiration. They are full of facts and data, but leave you feeling bored about jobs. Both John and I feel that establishing a rewarding career requires trying out lots of activities to find out what you like and dislike. Ultimately, the career that is right for you is the one that you have fun at. The goal of Inspired2Work is to allow people to explore many types of work, and to hopefully find work that inspires them.