Career Anchors Reimagined, 5th Edition

APPENDIXCareer Anchors and Career‐Oriented Personality Assessments

Career counseling has become a major field in the last fifty years and is filled with various kinds of tools, surveys, programs, and workshops that promise you not only self‐insight but, in some cases, even a job at the end of the program. The career anchors work started with the research panel that Ed Schein launched in the early 1960s but did not produce any useful research results until the 1970s when revisiting the panel members revealed this concept of career anchors and helped to define concepts and workshops for mid‐career adults to supplement the already massive programs that were present for those just beginning their careers.

Apart from the research results on the importance of anchors as an aspect of mid and later careers, Ed discovered that the research interviews were received by everyone as a unique experience of self‐discovery. Almost everyone said, after the experience how “this is the first time that anyone has ever asked me this question, so for the first time I am thinking about my work and my career.”

It was this insight that led to evolving the booklet and the exercises that went through four editions in the last 40 years and is now confronting an entirely different world because of technological and social changes, as well as the impact of the pandemic. The point is that there is today not only much more help available to the mid‐career occupant but an even greater need for such help as ...