How Can You Make More Informed Career Choices?

When it comes to making decisions that may have a long-term effect upon your life, it’s understandable to freeze up. Choosing what to order off a delivery app with thousands of choices is difficult enough, let alone choosing a single future out of hundreds of future career goals.

However, what if there was a way you could streamline this decision-making choice by breaking your future down into smaller choices that would eventually lead you to the final answer?

Enter Tiedeman’s Decision-Making Model!

How does this model apply to you?

Tiedeman’s model applies to all healthcare professionals because it helps you identify fulfilling options for your future career.

Sometimes, being spoilt for choice can make decisions far harder than they otherwise would be. Working in the healthcare industry definitely makes you spoilt for choice. There are so many areas and specialties available that you might need a model to help you straighten out all of those choices.

What is Tiedeman’s Decision-Making Model?

Tiedeman’s Decision-Making Model broke the career-related decision-making process into two parts: anticipation and implementation.

Anticipation

This first stage includes four steps: exploration, crystallisation, choice, and clarification (Valamis, 2021).

This gives you the opportunity to separate the ideation of your career goals – ie. figuring out what you’re actually interested in – from the process of pursuing them.

Ideally, the exploration step is occurring at all times. However, the crystallisation step, which involves further investigation of the results of exploration, is more intentional – this intentional nature carries on into choice and clarification, as well.

Implementation

The second stage – implementation – includes another three steps: induction, reformation and integration (Valamis, 2021).

This stage is when you’re setting the wheels in motion. You’ve made a choice, and now you’re fine-tuning the specifics in order to fit this choice into your life. Both expectations based off your choice and your own traditional way of doing things are subject to change here: reformation and integration indicate that you’re readjusting one thing in order to accommodate another. In this case, you may be readjusting a previous goal to make space for a new goal that relates to your new career.

Why did Tiedeman create this model?

Instead of divorcing career decisions from the rest of a person’s life, psychologist Dr D.V. Tiedeman, PhD, argued that any decision-making process regarding the future of one’s professional career should include considerations from the person’s professional and external life.

Created with fellow psychologist Anna Miller-Tiedeman, Tiedeman’s Decision-Making Model was originally developed for the purpose of creating software that could take input from users and spit out relevant and fulfilling vocations – think of the careers aptitude test you probably had to do when you were in school (IResearchNet, 2016). This program was eventually called the Information System for Vocational Decisions (ISVD) (IResearchNet, 2016).

However, the binary nature of creating software mixed with the qualitative and anecdotal answers made Tiedeman’s job very difficult. How can you create a functional junction between those two expectations?

Where can you learn more?

A great way to help put this model into context is to do some research around the options available to you. Even if you’re not looking to move around within the industry at the moment, use this as an exercise to reassess your priorities and goals.

For nurses and midwives, affiliate organisations such as the Coalition of National Nursing and Midwifery Organisations have great resources available to you. Look at this list of member organisations to see how many different types of nursing there are: Members | CoNNMO.

Knowing how this model can help you when the time comes is essential! It will save you time and stress, and is a great tool to have in your back pocket should you – or any of your colleagues – need help clarifying where to go next.

References

IResearchNet, 2016. ‘Tiedeman’s Theory.' IResearchNet: Psychology. Accessed 21 June 2022 via http://psychology.iresearchnet.com/counseling-psychology/counseling-theories/tiedemans-theory/

Valamis, 2021. ‘9 Career Development Theories: Build Your Journey [Guide].’ Valamis: Resources. Accessed 21 June 2022 via https://www.valamis.com/hub/career-development-theories#tiedeman-and-miller