This blog post shares a career discernment practice: K-W-L, a way of mapping what you already know, want to know, and need to learn.
Career discernment coaching involves, among many things, listening to and learning from fears, uncertainties, and the many unknowns involved in making change. Sometimes what’s needed is recognizing fear—allowing it to speak, be witnessed, and given a right-sized role. Other times, what’s needed is a way to list and begin to answer question after question. Still at other times, what’s needed is creating more capacity to acknowledge what we don’t yet know and to map pathways for learning.
So often, even if we can imagine career possibilities, there are so many unknowns that it’s hard to take steps toward those possibilities. This variation on the K-W-L reading strategy helps to organize what information we’ve already got on hand and what more we want to know and need to learn in order to turn unknowns into knowns.
This video explains the process, and this handout offers space for practicing.
Like many career discernment practices, this exercise can be repeated multiple times. I’d suggest printing a new table for each career path and then noticing patterns across the tables you complete.
For example, if you’re considering whether to stay or leave an academic position, you might complete one table for “inside higher ed” and another for “outside higher ed.” When I completed this exercise, I realized how much I needed to learn about alt-ac, non-ac, and post-ac positions, so I began making research goals for each pathway. At its best, this K-W-L exercise can prompt action and reveal next steps.
I offer this and other practices through the related course “Career Discernment for Academics: Aligning Career with Commitments.” Though I believe this course is ever-needed as our lives are ever-changing, I also know that career discernment is central in these times of attacks on higher education. I hope that offering this practice and related resources may provide support—many ways to access more self-knowledge, confidence, and clarity, even when conditions are constraining and the questions too numerous to count.
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This post is written by Beth Godbee, Ph.D. (she/her) for Heart-Head-Hands: Everyday Living for Justice. Beth is an academic (previously tenured professor and now self-employed writer and educator) who believes in ongoing career discernment, has deep commitments to social and racial justice, and brings the following experiences to this work:
- conducting and mentoring others through local, national, and international job searches
- navigating annual reviews and the tenure process
- earning tenure and still choosing to leave higher education
- navigating various research, teaching, and service responsibilities
- serving as a writing program administrator
- collaborating with career professionals in and out of academia
- growing a small business, freelancing, speaking, and consulting
- mentoring writers, researchers, and educators widely across disciplines—through years of working in writing centers and writing across the curriculum
- consulting with community-based, public-health, faith-based, and other organizations
- researching and centering issues of injustice, inequity, power, agency, and rights in all conversations
- knowing first-hand why career discernment needs to be confidential when there’s so much at stake.
If you resonated with this practice, you might be interested in these related blog posts:
- “What Is Career Discernment?”
- “Career Discernment for a Purposeful Career Path”
- “Career Discernment for Academics: An Interview with Self-Compassionate Professor”
- “20 Reading Recommendations for Career Discernment”
- “Deciding to Leave Higher Ed: Strategies for Career Discernment”
- “Planning a Career Change in 3 Stages”
- “After Academia: Career Paths in Community Writing”
- “Intervening into Burnout, Building a Sense of What’s Possible”
- “Reflection Questions for Sabbaticals (and Transitional Seasons of Life)”
- “Coaching as a Way of Working with Fears”
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