Shane's “career anchors” are the orientations and interests of a certain person, prompting him to a specific professional activity. According to management professor Edgar Shane, each of the people living on our planet has such anchors.
Description of the technique
Shane’s “career anchors” can arise in the early years of your career and stay with you for many years. Edgar Shane identified only eight orientations that all of humanity is striving for. These orientations include:
- entrepreneurship;
- professional competence;
- management;
- independence (or in other words, the author calls it autonomy);
- workplace stability;
- stability of the place of residence;
- unification (integration) of human life styles;
- service;
- call.
Each person has several pronounced anchors.
Shane’s Career Anchors technique is used to determine which of the professional orientations and values are more pronounced for a particular employee. Orientation is determined by scales-anchors.
Method Scales
What does each of the anchor scales mean? This is a key point in Shane’s Career Anchors technique:
- An anchor of competency in the profession (or professional competence) tells how much the employee wants others to appreciate and recognize his talents. Most often, such employees select for themselves such positions, being in which they can realize this opportunity.
- Anchor management. Those who possess this pronounced anchor love power and want to control people. The main desire of these people is to manage something, for the sake of this they are even ready to bear responsibility for other people, to direct their actions in the right direction. For them, the final result of the work is important.
- Anchor of independence (autonomy). It must be borne in mind that people who dominate the given anchor from all the listed anchors of Shane’s career constantly strive for freedom, they want to be freed from all sorts of rules and do not transfer discipline to the spirit. Such people always strive to live only by their own rules.
- Anchor of workplace stability (work stability). For such workers, the main thing is to have reliable and stable earnings for a sufficiently long time. Such employees do not like change at all and do not understand what it makes sense in projects that are designed for short periods, and simply do not undertake their implementation. Unlike people with a management anchor, those employees who have a more “developed” workplace stability anchor are rarely willing to agree to bear a heavy burden of responsibility.
- Anchor of stability of the place of residence. Employees with such an anchor are more likely to stay in one place for a rather long amount of time, in other words, they do not want to leave their home, hometown. For this, they are ready to ignore all possible business trips and even promotions in other cities.
- Anchor of service. Such an anchor is responsible for the zeal and desire of the employee to be useful to the people around him. Such people always have good intentions and they want to see a good result of their work. Workers with this anchor will not be able (and, accordingly, will not) work in organizations whose goals and intentions are hostile. Especially vivid expression is observed in doctors or veterinarians.
- Anchor call. A person with a developed call anchor is used to doing what, according to many, is simply impossible, thereby challenging others. The process of struggle for something and some kind of rivalry is the engine of all their activities. Without this stream of constant “calls” to oneself and others, the employee simply becomes bored, and therefore any of his activity may decrease.
- The anchor of the unification (integration) of lifestyles is the desire to have everything at the same time. Family, career, self-development - everything is important for such people. They simply cannot sacrifice one for the other.
- Anchor of entrepreneurship. A person with a developed anchor of entrepreneurship has a need to create something and realize all his ideas.
Shane’s Career Anchors Questionnaire
To identify which anchors are most developed in a particular person, it is possible using a specific test. This is a questionnaire that contains forty-one questions. For each of the questions, the employee must give an answer on a scale of one to ten:
1 - what the question says about is absolutely not interesting for me. 10 - the topic raised in the question is extremely important to me. The result of the test is the arithmetic average of the sum of all points that the testee received for all of the eight anchors.
Where are such tests conducted and why
Shane’s “Career Anchors” tests are usually used to determine the level of professional motivation. Apply it by HR specialists. To date, such a test can be passed by anyone, even without leaving home, on the Internet. But when receiving the result of an Internet test, it is worth remembering that your results were not checked by experts, but only by the system, so the results of such tests should not be taken too seriously. If this is too important for you, then you should turn to a prestigious psychologist in order to get the true and accurate result of your testing.
How to count points
The points for each of the eight anchors are summarized (the correspondence of the anchors and the question numbers of their points will be presented below in the key to the test). It is necessary to summarize the scores for each of the eight rows and divide them by the number of questions associated with them (there are five everywhere, except for "stability").
The key to the test
- An anchor of competency in the profession: one, nine, seventeen, twenty five, thirty three.
- Anchor of management: two, ten, eighteen, twenty six, thirty four.
- Anchor of independence (autonomy): three, eleven, nineteen, twenty seven, thirty five.
- Anchor of stability of a place of work: four, twelve, thirty six.
- Anchor of stability of a place of residence: twenty, twenty eight, forty one.
- Anchor of service: five, thirteen, twenty one, twenty nine, thirty seven.
- Call Anchor: six, fourteen, twenty two, thirty, thirty eight.
- Anchor combining lifestyles: seven, fifteen, twenty three, thirty one, thirty nine.
- Anchor of entrepreneurship: eight, sixteen, twenty four, thirty two, forty.