• 30 Jan. 2022
• Career Theory
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The Proposition and Demonstration of Career Allocation Theory

Career Allocation and Asset Allocation

The word "Allocation" may remind you of Asset Allocation, which means aims to balance risk and reward by apportioning a portfolio’s assets according to an individual’s goals, risk tolerance, and investment horizon[1]. Correspondingly, we can define the concept of Career Allocation:

Career Allocation refers to planning careers into different types of occupations or hobbies according to personal characteristics and work factors in career planning and career education(we refer to Frank Parsons’ trait and factor theory[2]). Like the popular slash career concept, when getting appropriate material and spiritual satisfaction to reduce the bandwidth scarcity[3], we can reduce the risk of our life, meanwhile.

By connecting asset allocation and career allocation, many theories and knowledge related to investment can be compared in similar situations in career planning. However, the problem is: can we connect asset allocation and career planning?

I think it is possible to connect them, as Reed Gary Hoffman, the founder of the world-renowned workplace social platform Linkedin, first stated in his book The Start-up of You. The chapter All Human Are Entrepreneursmentioned:

"To adapt to the challenges of professional life today, we need to rediscover our entrepreneurial instincts and use them to forge new sorts of careers."

The Start-up of You, Reed Gary Hoffman

I Agreed. If a person decides not to spend this life in an undisciplined manner and try to achieve some career goals for his life, then this person is an entrepreneur. For example, the brain is the management group, the hands are the employees, and the physical demand for living quality maintenance is the cash flow. Briefly, managing a large enterprise or a large fund is management (asset management), managing oneself is also management (career management) correspondingly. Both of them are Generalized ‘management’, so for these aspects, management science and management theory can be universally applied.

Slash Career

A very typical example of career allocation is ‘slash career’, a concept from the book One Person/multiple careers A New Model for Work-Life Successwritten by Marci Alboher. She mentioned in the book that:

"More and more young people today are no longer satisfied with the boring lifestyle of “single career”, but begin to choose a multi-life that can have multiple careers and identities. These people will use slashes in their self-introduction to distinguish different professions, for example, Lenny Pratt, lawyer/actor/producer, so “slash” has become synonymous with them."

One Person/multiple careers A New Model for Work-Life Success, Marci Alboher

While people may think a slash career is a new trend, I believe that a slash career is an intrinsic purpose of human beings. In the human-gathering society that has lasted for millions of years, human beings are faced with a dangerous and changeable living environment. For this reason, they have to acquire the ability to adapt to changes and comprehensive survival skills through training.

However, the Agricultural Revolution, which lasted for thousands of years, and the Industrial Revolution, which lasted for hundreds of years, successively restricted humans to fixed land and fixed workplaces, engaged in repetitive labor without many challenges. Therefore, “specialization” has become the ‘natural’ of this era. To sum up, from the perspective of people’s preferences, it is our nature to love a diverse life.

In addition to this lifestyle being more human, the following important social trends have made ‘Slash’ more and more popular:

1. In the post-industrial era, the service industry will gradually become the largest industry, and more talents from other industries will enter.

2. This is an era of knowledge and creativity, an era of content, and value creation depends on those who can produce high-quality content and create products and services that are truly in demand.

3. With the increase in the demand for excellent talents and their own choices, the traditional employment system will even gradually transform into a cooperative type, and excellent talents have greater autonomy in the distribution of time and profits.

4. With the advent of the new era, the whole society has rekindled the desire and worship for knowledge, which will bring great opportunities for knowledge-based talents.

Hedgehog Model

In career planning, there is a “hedgehog model” to help you find your most satisfying career:

For the specific method of using this model, you can refer to Karan Shah’s TED talk: He used to be a financial practitioner: skilled and high income but not interested. Later he tried to become a lecturer of finance: skilled and interested but low income. Later he also tried to be a politician: interested and high income but not skilled. Ultimately he found the intersection of all the circles: becoming an Edutech entrepreneur[5]

However, he also mentioned in his speech that it is difficult to find a career that is perfect for you because most careers have their pros and cons. However, if a profession cannot satisfy its own “hedgehog model”, it is completely possible to complete its own “hedgehog model” through two or more professions by using allocation methods.

In Gu Dian’s book What is The Possibility of Your Life(Written in Chinese), Gu Dian proposed in the chapter ‘good life = pleasure + interest’: a good life should be both pleasure and interest, but pleasure and interest are often contradictory. Specifically, interest is an emotion that is highly correlated with “uncertainty,” while pleasure is an emotion that is highly correlated with “certainty,” where paradox can be seen from this. However, to attract children who are easily distracted, the animation designers used the ‘pleasant + interesting’ mode for 1st and 2nd protagonists, such as Donkey and Shrek, Sasuke and Naruto, Porcupine and Little Lion King, etc.

Wise people know how to adjust the ‘uncertainty’ that fits them. Sometimes we also think that we are a child who is inattentive at work, so we might as well try the ‘pleasant + interest’ dual-career model so that we will not doubt our career development because of monotony.

At the same time, consciously looking for a “second career” that belongs to oneself is also an active way of life that jumps out of one’s comfortable life circle and explores new possibilities. If you want to change careers in the future, you can also use some of the time that originally belonged to your first career as a prototype for your second career. This is the tenet throughout the book Design Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Lifewritten by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.

Opposite Opinions

However, the most commonly used argument by opponents of this career allocation theory is that people have limited energy in their lives, so they must concentrate. They often take distracted people who are motivated to “learn this today and learn that tomorrow” as an example to argue. But according to Marci (the New York Times columnist mentioned above), the core criterion for a “slash career” should be having two or more skill advantages that are recognizable by others. If they have only been exposed to a certain field and have not made it a recognized advantage through long-term investment, then such a person is not qualified to label himself as a ‘slash career’. The author also proposes that the more mature people are, the more likely they are to become slashes because time and experience will make people understand themselves better and have enough time to devote themselves to things they like.

If you think about investment, career allocation is still better than a single occupation for most people, which is corresponding to “diversified investment” and “centralized investment” in terms of investment. According to Warren Buffett, if you’re already particularly familiar with stock and feel confident enough to invest in it, then concentrate on investment. But for retail investors who don’t know much about stocks, it’s better to diversify and fight risk. This is a widely accepted truth for experienced investors. So back to career allocation, are you a retail investor or a professional investment institution? In this regard, you need to correct your position: if you are already at the top level in a certain industry, for example in the technology industry, you have published many top papers in scientific research and have a high impact factor, and you are a top reviewer for well-known journals. In terms of engineering, you are chief engineers of large-scale projects, craftsmen of big countries, etc., and most importantly: being able to shake an industry with your influence(similar to investment dealers). However, as we all know, the vast majority of people can only belong to ordinary small retail investors, so it is best to ‘diversify investment’.

Career Allocation theory can also force you to configure some dedication to a long-term career. In the Medium article Bezos, Musk, & Buffett See The World Differently, Because They See Time Differently[6], the writer illustrates this by showing a TED talk delivered by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen:

As Christensen tells it, when he graduated from Harvard Business School, all of his classmates had ambitious plans to make an impact and be successful. At their early class reunions, everything seemed like it was on track. People were sharing all of their successes.

However, as time passed by, he noticed something surprising. People’s lives got worse and worse on many levels:

• 1. They got divorced.
• 2. They became estranged from their kids.
• 3. Some even got in trouble for fraud.
• 4. They suffered poor health.

Christensen explains why:

"Everyone here is driven to achieve. And when you have an extra ounce of energy or an extra 30 minutes of time, instinctively and unconsciously you’ll allocate it to whatever activities in your life give you the most immediate evidence of achievement."

The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Clayton Christensen

In other words, his classmates got stuck in short-term thinking.

A second quote builds off Christensen’s world-renowned work on why the world’s most successful companies, which have billions of dollars in the bank and employ the world’s smartest people, are often disrupted by startups — something that theoretically should never happen:

"The reason why successful companies fail is that they invest in things that provide the most immediate and tangible evidence of achievement. And the reason why they have such a short time horizon is that they are run by people like you and I [people focused on achievement]."

The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Clayton Christensen

The ABZ model is a career allocation method that I recommend, ABZ model was first proposed by Reed Gary Hoffman in his book The Start-up of You, and in simple terms is the main business-side business-retreat model. In the book, he explains that:

Plan A is what you’re doing right now.
Plan B is what you pivot to when you need to change either your goal or the route for getting there.
Plan Z is the fallback position: your lifeboat.

The Start-up of You, Reed Gary Hoffman

My Understanding

My understanding is: Plan A refers to the work we are doing to fully leverage our competitive advantage, the ‘main business’. Plan B refers to a kind of work that we are exploring. The purpose is to prepare to change Plan A for various reasons, but do not want to cause trouble or even panic if there is a fault in our career. We can temporarily transfer to Plan B, that is, ‘sideline’. Plan Z refers to the need to have a plan to take all the risks and uncertainties of plans A, B, and more, without the There is nothing, that is, ‘the way back to home’.

Such a career plan does have certain challenges to implement. How to allocate your time and energy? How do keep the main side business from the main business without disturbing each other? What is more difficult for me is still what Christensen mentioned previously: the short-term thinking problem as a human. Everyone knows very well that the best short-term strategy is to cancel side jobs and use all the spare time to focus on the main business so that one can improve his/her skills and find a higher-paying job shortly. These are visible, tangible material improvements. However, in the first stage, your B-plan is still in the early stages of development, where money is needed in all aspects, and it is not clear whether the future development of the B-plan is clear. This is a temptation and a reason for self-doubt. Although it is said that the plan has been made, in the process of implementing the plan, many ambiguous ideas have been interfering with everyone’s judgment.

Therefore, everyone might enhance their awareness of career allocation and ensure that their career plan can be implemented properly.

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