We Are Ready for the Next Question

Career development has always been driven by a question. The question has evolved over time, and each evolution has represented a genuine attempt to better serve people. We are now ready for the next question.

In the early days of publicly funded employment services — the 1980s, in my experience — the question was blunt and practical: What are you going to do? We handed people lists of available jobs and told them to get moving. I did this myself as a social worker with the BC Government. It was well-intentioned. It was also, in retrospect, closer to traffic management than career development. We were moving people through a system, not helping them find direction.

By the 1990s, the field had grown more humane. The question became, What fits for you? We began matching personalities, interests, and skills to occupational categories — Holland Codes, Myers-Briggs, interest inventories of every description. This was genuine progress. It said that the person mattered, and that their characteristics should inform their career direction.

Something Still Wasn’t Right

But something nagged. In practice, we were playing an elaborate game of musical chairs. People moved from employed to unemployed and back again, cycling through the system with better self-knowledge but not much more direction. Those outside the career development field, including, frankly, many of our clients, often found the matching process puzzling. Knowing you are an ISFJ with Realistic-Social Holland Codes does not tell you what to do with your life. It tells you something about how you function. That is not the same thing.

The moment it became real for me came on a Monday morning in a small office with a very large and very frustrated man named Dennis. Those who have heard me speak or read my earlier books will recognize this story. I make no apology for returning to it — some moments earn the repetition.

Dennis’ Story

Dennis was one of sixteen people who had received a letter from the ministry making clear that attendance at my Strategic Career Planning workshop was not optional. Miss it and lose your benefits. He arrived angry — understandably so — and he made that anger felt. About ten minutes into the first session, I called a break. The room emptied quickly. I managed to catch Dennis before he left and invited him into my office.

He told me exactly what was on his mind; he didn’t have time for navel-gazing or silly games. He didn’t know how he was going to feed his kids that night, pay the rent at the end of the week, or keep the lights on. Dennis had real problems. This was not helping.

I intended to give him my standard social worker response: I hear your concerns. Let’s see what we can arrange and send him on his way. What came out of my mouth instead surprised me as much as it surprised him.

So, what do you plan to contribute with your life?

Dennis’ Response

I had not planned to say it. I am still not entirely sure where it came from. Dennis raised his right hand and I braced myself. But the hand went to his eyes, not toward me. He was wiping away tears.

When he composed himself, he said, “If you can help me figure that out, I will be here every day. I will find a way to feed the kids and pay the rent. I always do.”

He became my best participant. He encouraged others when they got discouraged. He drove people to the workshop when they had no transportation. And when the program ended, he built a small business — worm farming, as it happened — giving back to his community in the way he had always wanted to: employing people who needed a break, serving customers who appreciated the personal attention, and contributing in ways the job cycle had never given him the chance to.

That morning in my office, without intending to, I asked the third question: “What do you want to contribute?”

It is worth noting how similar the third question sounds to the first. Both ask about doing. But the first was a demand, the system pointing a person toward available roles and expecting compliance. The third is an elicitation, drawing out something that has been there all along, waiting for the right conditions to surface. One pushes. The other opens.

What Makes This Question More Powerful?

This question is different in kind from the two that preceded it. It does not ask what is available, or what fits. It asks what the person intends to give to their community, to the world, and to the people they will serve through their work. It assumes that every person has something to contribute, that this contribution is worth identifying, and that a career built around delivering it will be more durable, more satisfying, and more useful to everyone involved than one built around filling an available role.

I have been asking this question, in one form or another, for nearly forty years. I have asked it in workshops across Canada, in Nunavut communities, and in rooms full of employment workers in the United Kingdom and Europe. People who had never held a job have been asked this question. People who had held the same job for twenty years and lost their sense of purpose have also been asked.

The answer is almost always available. It has usually been waiting quietly for someone to ask.

The Field is Ready for the Question

What I have heard from career advisors over those forty years tells me the field is ready for this question, too. Again and again, practitioners have said some version of the same thing: If only I could have this conversation with my clients. They entered this work because they wanted to make a genuine difference in people’s lives, and instead, they find themselves helping people polish résumés and rehearse interview answers for jobs that may not materialize.

The system has not yet given them permission to ask the third question. But the permission is not the system’s to give. It belongs to us.

Building, Not Replacing

The question does not replace what came before it. People still need to work. They still need income, stability, and a practical path forward. The contribution-first approach does not ask anyone to wait for perfect clarity before taking a job. It asks something simpler: that we help people understand what they are trying to build before we help them build it.

Dennis needed rent money and food for his kids. He knew that. What changed for him that Monday morning was not his circumstances — it was his direction. And once he had direction, the practical steps followed with a motivation that the job-matching model had never produced.

We have asked, What are you going to do? We have asked, What fits for you? Both questions have served people, imperfectly, in their time.

We are ready for the next one.

– By Steve Miller – 

This article was edited with the support of Claude.ai. The ideas and insights shared are entirely the author’s own.

Photo by LeeLoo the First on Pexels.