Flex your BICEPS 💪

🎂 Happy birthday Career River! This week marks one year since I started appearing in your inboxes. Thank you all for joining me on this ride!

I was lured into my career at the basement door of my childhood home.

My mom was working on a book where she interviewed police officers about their jobs. My brother and I were not allowed into the basement while she was working, but I could hear the muffled voices from her interview tapes (yes, tapes) from the door at the top of the stairs.

I remember thinking to myself, in my child brain, “There’s a job where you get to listen to stories and tell them to other people? I love stories! And telling people stuff!”

Whenever I lose sight of what brought me into journalism, I try to recapture that feeling of excitement I had at the basement door.

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We all have reasons we got into the careers we’re pursuing, both personal and practical. Maybe you’ve been thinking about this job since you were a kid, or maybe you happened upon it later on.

Somewhere along the way, though, we stop thinking as much about how our work fulfills us. Maybe the soulless job search process or daily grind sucks the enthusiasm right out of our bones. Or maybe we’re so concerned with whether we’re doing a good job that we stop considering whether our work is offering us what we need, too.

I recently attended a fantastic presentation by Sam Ragland of the American Press Institute which introduced me to the BICEPS framework by Paloma Medina. This framework lists core needs people have for their work and personal lives:

• Belonging, which includes feeling closeness with a group and finding mutual understanding with another person;
• Improvement, which includes your daily work creating progress toward a goal and seeing growth in skills that matter to you;
• Choice, including flexibility and autonomy;
• Equality/Fairness, including equitable access to resources and access to information;
• Predictability, such as knowing that necessary resources will be available and pursuing consistent goals;
• Significance, or doing work that has a clear purpose and seeing how it fits into a positive mission.

Ragland has written about how news leaders can use curiosity and empathy to address core needs on their teams. I believe as career navigators we can also intentionally center what needs we want our work to support.

Look at the BICEPS list and consider which core needs you’d want to be addressed as you move forward in the next stage of your career. At this moment, is it more important for you to be part of a larger community or to have the freedom to make choices? Do you need to know you’ll have resources (time, money) to do your work or are you focused on the larger purpose you’d like to serve?

Like so much of our working lives, these priorities will (and should!) shift over time. In job-hunting mode, we’re often laser-focused on what we could bring to the role. Let’s remember to consider what a new role could bring to you, too. 💪

Happy navigating,
Bridget