Finding my Ikigai
Three years ago, I realised that for the most part of my adult life I’d been ticking other people’s boxes. I have immense gratitude for the education I could afford and the jobs I went into. Yet as I sat in a ‘School of Life’ workshop on a warm Spring day, the feeling that I had started to drift away from my own life’s purpose, my Ikigai, started to creep in.
The School of Life is an educational company offering programmes to help people navigate life transitions. I attended it during my third career transition. Reflecting on my own difficult, but often transformative and positive, experience of moving across roles or industries, I realised just how little support there is for young and older people alike to explore who they are and what that means for their place in the world of work.
After the School of Life was over, I went on to conduct more than one hundred hours of interviews with 16-26 years-olds and I learned about their plans for life after school and how they felt about it. Statements like:
“I don’t know what I’m good at”
“I have no idea”
“I feel anxious”
were too frequent for me to feel comfortable about the scale of the issue. I committed to building something that would contribute towards a scalable solution.
Young people need information and guidance at their fingertips
We already use data to help us manage our financial and physical health, so why not our careers, where we invest up to 80% of our adult life?
DfE has made a compelling case for using data and tools in career guidance (Informed Choice, 2017). Realising this vision at scale will contribute towards the Gatsby Benchmarks and respond to what students actually want: more personalised advice and opportunities, according to AGCAS.
By sponsoring digital, “always-on” career guidance, which is data-driven and bespoke, education partners will help to address key challenges of career provision, which remains patchy, reactive and dependent on self-enrolment for the most part, according to a study by Resolution Ventures (From Platforms to Promotions). In turn, the data collected about their students’ and alumni’s ambitions and outcomes will equip the sponsoring institutions with the intelligence they need to design curricula and campaigns around prospective students’ needs as well as the job market. Ultimately, this will feed into a virtuous cycle of more relevant education pathways for stronger learner engagement, outcomes and numbers.
The time to invest in this space is now:
only 33% of university students feel satisfied or partly satisfied with the quality of career advice received (UPP Foundation Student Futures Commission);
20% of higher education students are lost every year to alternative credentials (HolonIQ, 2022)
and 85% of all jobs that will be available in 2030 do not exist today (BCG).
Investing in data-driven technologies
Making informed career decisions, including about education pathways, entails making sense of many, moving parts, like: career preferences; curriculum and extracurricular activities; professional experience; the live jobs’ market; longitudinal education outcomes; labour market insights. This involves complex decision-making. Proven technologies such as knowledge graphs and natural language processing can automate and expedite part of this.
At Ikigai Data, we use these technologies to build tools and experiences that help young people navigate complex career decisions. Working with hundreds of young people in secondary, post-secondary education and early on in their career, we have learned that the support they need and often lack consists of:
- Clarity: about themselves and what they bring to work
- Information: about the changing world of work
- Networks: to navigate entry into work
- A playground: to give jobs a try.
Through our Career Discovery Series, we have built a guided journey of inward and outward exploration, following the framework of Ikigai. We help young people gain clarity about what they are passionate about and what they are good at and to explore how the world of work is changing. The discovery is not guided by a teacher or a parent or a figure of authority. But by a proven methodology and a cohort of “people like you”, sharing their lived experience and bringing both empathy and accountability.
Ava, a student who attended our Career Discovery Series, did not have much of a clue about what to do after school. Guessing Biology might be a safe choice salary-wise and also because that’s what her parents encouraged her to do, she used the Series to investigate whether Biology was indeed the right choice for her. She took part in reflective and group exercises, where she found a safe space to express her love for theater and appreciate her story-telling and writing accomplishments. Along with the cohort, she started to gain clarity about the characteristics of jobs she might love and then crowdsourced ideas about new career directions to explore: publishing, professional facilitation, advocacy and change management. With greater confidence in her interests and skills and with the support of her peers, Ava found the confidence to discuss them with her parents, who ultimately supported her new direction.
Our biggest limitation is our perception of other people’s opinion of us - Dr Brooks explores this with more examples in her blog for Edge: The Career Development Plan. For this reason too, the Discovery process starts with a Passion Alignment module, which explores the individual self and not jobs directly:
“I am curious as to whether I was limiting myself”,
said a participant before starting her journey on the Career Discovery Series.
Similarly, focusing the second session on education and extracurricular accomplishments, students learn to appreciate what skills look like in practice. They get better at identifying and communicating them:
“I enjoyed the fact that out of one experience there were many skills that could be generalised to yourself”,
said another participant. In a study about Graduate Destinations (here), Edge Foundation found that the single strongest relationship with career satisfaction for students was seeing how education provided them with the skills to function highly effectively at work.
Using powerful data integrations and Natural Language Processing technologies, we are building tools that extract information from any description of students’ studies, societies and hobbies, to clarify what their skills, knowledge and work interests are, alongside their preferred work styles, values and context. Students can then learn about career destinations that may be a good fit for them and how to get there.
Building inclusive solutions
Disadvantage plays a huge role in what, how far and how wide, young people aspire for themselves in the future. We are a product of what we discover, learn and dream since childhood. Edge Foundation’s 2022 report on the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (Investigating the potential use of long-term school and college destination measures, February 2022) reveal that if you were on free school meals, you are 3 times more likely to be on benefits at age 30.
What we need is not more career education. But rather, a focus on career wellness: experiences and tools that encourage students to explore more widely and more deeply about themselves and the world of work, whatever their background - so they can be more intentional and engaged learners, and ultimately, aspire further. Doing this, they will gain the skills for managing their career early on and continue doing so well into their working lives.
As a career hopper myself, my ambition ultimately is not to bring down to zero the 25% of young people currently answering “I don’t know” when asked about their career destinations. But rather, that each young person we serve, will have gained the clarity and confidence they need to start (and to continue) figuring it out for themselves.
