Uncertainty Likes Company: Transforming Career Indecision by Leveraging Liminality
02/10/2024
Dr Nicole Canham is a professional musician, accredited career development practitioner and leading scholar in precarious work in the field of music. In addition to her PhD in classically trained musicians’ self-directed career development, Nicole completed a Graduate Diploma of Career Education and Development through RMIT in 2019.
Most of my work is driven by a key question: as it gets harder and harder to predict what is around the corner, what new forms of support do clients need to craft satisfying and sustainable working lives?
Employability in education settings tends to be understood as a form of individual skills development. However, focusing on skills alone is no longer enough to ensure high quality graduate/client outcomes in the present conditions. For young people, career development practitioners play an especially important role in contributing to education and interventions that enhance their decision-making skills. These skills minimise their likelihood of work-related disengagement, which is a huge problem in Australia.
Exacerbated by prolonged periods of precarity and limited opportunities for advancement or professional development, four out of five adults report declining wellbeing or disengagement with work, which suggests that it is not just having the right skills, but also being able to navigate changing environments that is key to satisfaction at work.
Navigating Uncertainty
One of the most common by-products of change is uncertainty, and in my work with musicians and performing artists, navigating change is an important area of focus. As the world emerges from the Covid-19 global pandemic, and the full effects of its impact on musicians, places of higher education, and the music industry becomes apparent (UNESCO, 2020), musicians-as-workers need to be equipped for increasingly unpredictable futures.
These circumstances, however, are not limited to music: A.I.-related automation has been estimated to result in the forced transition of 100 million workers to other fields by 2030 (Lund et al., 2021). For many of us, therefore, change and uncertainty will continue to shape many aspects of life and work.
For career development practitioners, then, the challenge is one of supporting clients through transitions and emotions that may not have clear outcomes, nor be solved with specific skills or approaches. It is in this unclear territory that musicians display some unique career development competencies. Although the conditions outlined above can exacerbate their experiences of hardship, musicians also report that their passion for what they do inspires them to stay, and/or find ways to adapt (Bartleet et al., 2020).
Leveraging Liminality
Musicians’ capacity to leverage both the possibilities and the pitfalls of uncertainties and setbacks will be increasingly informative for practitioners in their work with other clients experiencing similar forms of liminality. The word liminality is derived from the Latin, “limen” which means threshold.
Liminality in career development is perhaps most helpful when thought of as both a time for reconsideration or reconfiguration, just as it can also be thought of as a bridge between one space and another, which invites us to consider our connections with, and empathy for, each other.
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of liminality, however, is that “in career development we’re often working towards goals, but when you’re in liminal space, you’re often not sure what that goal is” (Fruhling & Amundson, 2021). It is in this space – the idea of exploring the unknown goal – in the company of another person, that helping conversations can take on a much-needed new significance.
For those of us who work with student and young adult clients, liminality offers opportunities to think about uncertainty in new ways. If the future is harder to predict, particularly in terms of certain choices, actions or behaviours resulting in specific outcomes, then new ways of feeling certain or sure are needed. One of the only sure things about change is that in some way, things will be different.
Cochran’s (1994) definition of a career problem is a helpful idea: the size of a career problem can be understood in terms of how much a person thinks that problem will take them off the course they have set their sights upon. The bigger the detour from what was planned, the bigger the problem. However, in today’s very dynamic life/work context, is this still a helpful way of understanding career change?
I suggest it is, if we can expand our understanding of career problems beyond challenges that can be solved and instead view them as liminal spaces where reconfiguration is required. Though what reconfiguration looks like will vary from person to person, if we understand liminality as some kind of threshold or crossroads in a much larger journey, then we need to decide what we are moving towards, and also acknowledge what we are leaving behind.
Adopting Creative Approaches
Helpful approaches for these conditions might involve less specific forms of goal-setting or planning, and could instead open the door to more creative ways of working, such as adopting a similar process to packing for a trip: even if we’ve done all the research on the destination and climate there is no guarantee that conditions will 100% reflect our careful planning. The same is true for career development, particularly in the present circumstances.
Fewer and fewer roles will offer a clear sense of pathway or continuity, and clients and practitioners alike will need new ways of staying engaged with the uncertainties of career ‘travel’ when there are no promises that the destination will fulfil every expectation. Managing such contradictions with young adult clients can be especially challenging as there needs to be a balance between being realistic while not wanting to diminish the power of hopes and dreams.
Similarly, some rethinking around the process of career choice and employability as a set of specific skills, may be needed. A starting point in careers education for young adult clients, or indeed for those undergoing career transitions, might be to lean in to the possibilities afforded by liminality. Being aware of one’s core values, and harnessing these values to guide decision-making, can be very helpful in approaching the career uncertainties described above.
In research on musicians’ career development, musicians commonly seek to reinforce or recreate the known by holding onto a limited number of career ideas or pathways, which has been shown to have detrimental effects on their health, well-being and sense of professional identity largely because career decisions that are made to avoid risk in a general context of uncertainty reflect an unwillingness to accept the reality of the circumstances which are, for many, inescapable (Gross & Musgrave, 2021).
In my own research, I found that musicians who gravitate towards the unknown and actively draw upon a sense of adventure as they make decisions about their next steps, tend to make career decisions that reflect understanding of their core values as well as an acceptance of contextual uncertainties.
One way to help young adult clients be better prepared for the context that will shape their lives and work is to begin values-based career exploration prior to university. This can be particularly hard for counsellors and parents of young people interested in pursuing careers in the performing arts: perhaps because these careers have traditionally not been well-understood, or because we are often still seeking certainty in career decision-making by aligning aptitude with identifiable career pathways.
Ways of exploring personal values in a career development context of liminality include:
- reflecting on what constitutes a ‘good life’
- strengths-based ways of understanding oneself
- envisioning possible futures
- working through career scenarios where change and adaptation are required
I’ve developed a range of resources specifically for career conversations with aspiring young musicians to maximise the impact of existing interventions such as the Morrisby profile, and our Monash Performing Arts Careers Network provides a space for recent graduates to stay connected to a community of colleagues facing similar career development opportunities and challenges. As Watts reminds us “the only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
For access to resources on pursuing careers in the performing arts, contact [email protected].