Career Orientation: Self exploration using business methodologies

The workshop facilitated by Anna Birgersdotter, PhD, offered a hands-on opportunity to creatively apply business methodologies on ourselves by:

• Evaluating where we are and where we want to go. 
• Assess our own potential and ambitions. 
• Explore what (career) opportunities are within our reach with ease, and what others are within our reach if we redesign our presumptions.
• Starting to design our own strategy on how to get there.

After a brief introduction to innovation and entrepreneurship as an approach, the participants were given time to individually work with the Business Model You Canvas – a one-page visualisation guiding the process of turning needs, activities and resources into a possible career and create significant value.

This exercise was shared in break-out groups and followed by identifying career purposes and creatively imagining a brand-new life. What would we want to learn and how would we want to help humanity if we could go beyond the ordinary constraints and donate our fortune to a certain cause for instance?

The purpose statement: ”I would like to ”help” ”people” by doing ”activity”  was another helpful tool to organise career ideas, synthesising activities, people and ways of helping. Afterwards group sharing and discussions followed to spark new ideas.

Since life work life is not always fulfilling, it is also important to identify pain points, work with bridging areas of dissatisfaction and continue to what action needs to be taken AND what is the first step? This exercise resulted in a first plan of action stating what, when how to give a sense of direction.

As an extra bonus, some additional tools were introduced to help to identify types of tasks we enjoy working with (current and new ones) and potentially find new, unexpected combinations.

Learning outcomes:

1. Applying business model and strategy on our own careers. 2. Self knowledge.