Why we should all be interested in life design

The dream job is dead. Long live the dream job? What if we moved on to life design instead? That is to say, building your career path and your life throughout it rather than betting everything on a decision taken when you were 18. In short, be flexible and agile to better adapt to today's world and our wishes. 

Be your own designer 

To talk about life design, we need to talk about Mark Savickas, one of its main theorists. He is American, has a PhD in Guidance and Counseling from Kent State University where he still teaches, has written 3 books on life design and over 100 scientific articles. So, he knows the concept well. He defines it as looking at the individual as the sole designer of their journey, “rather than focusing on jobs or moving up the ladder”. 

Professor Savickas and his colleagues have been developing this life design theory for about 25 years. For Auguste Dumouilla, a researcher in counseling psychology at JobTeaser, it is therefore “the most up-to-date theoretical model in counseling”. This model is based on the fact that it “allows the individual to become aware of his or her personal characteristics and to develop them in order to choose his or her studies and professional activities in all circumstances of life”. In short, to be active in your life course by learning to manage the unexpected.

Why we all need life design 

Gone are the days when we made our career in one and the same company, with an internal job and salary evolution. On average, we will all change jobs 12 times in our lives. This is normal, since the world and society as a whole have changed. Savickas talks about a “post-corporate” society. 

Since the 1970’s - and the first oil shock - big companies have started to stop getting bigger. Add to that the transition from industrialisation to digitalisation and the globalisation of the economy, and a new society is born. The problem is that the concept of a career - and therefore of a dream job - used to meet the needs of large companies. Therefore, we need to change our approach to counseling to adapt it to today's uncertain, unstable and much less predictable world. Seen like that, it's scary, but don't panic. It also means seizing new opportunities and achieving success.

The benefits of life design 

Life design is therefore here to help us navigate the current world and its new codes of orientation. This model of orientation has several benefits and goals. The first is to help us structure our narrative identity. That is, to learn how to tell our story. The idea is not to prepare to do a TED Talks but to write a life story by focusing on the search for coherence and continuity. It makes you aware of your own career and the paths you want to take, but it's also more than useful for answering the question “tell us a bit about yourself” during an interview. And of course, as there is “life” in life design, this story will change over the course of our lives and adapt to our goals. 

Another benefit of the life design model is to promote the adaptability of individuals. This means enabling each person to develop the resources to respond to a career made up of uncertainties. This means learning to recognise the opportunities that suit us and to reject the others, accepting to change our objectives according to the period of life we are in, knowing how to define our priorities... 

Finally, the challenge - and the main difficulty - of this new paradigm of counselling that is life design is to welcome the unknown and learn to manage uncertainty. It's easier said than done, but it's definitely worth learning more about it.