While it is important to have a sense of an employee’s career path, it is also valuable to be aware of the underlying motivation driving career decisions. This aspect of individual careers can be explained through Schein’s theory of career anchors. Career anchors refer to how people understand themselves relative to their career, and comprise perceptions regarding talents, abilities, values, and motives. Career anchors develop as a function of an individual’s early career and life experiences. Once formed, they remain relatively stable for the rest of one’s working life.

Career anchors become tangible when people reach a critical juncture in their careers, and they help to shape what direction to go or decision to make. While individuals may make career choices that are not congruent with their career anchors, the theory postulates that people experience greater satisfaction and more positive outcomes to the extent that there is congruence. Generally, individuals are considered to manifest just one of the eight anchors. One way of understanding the differences between anchors is to sort them into three categories: talent-based, needs-based, and value-based anchors.

Talent-based career anchors, including technical/functional competence, managerial competence, and entrepreneurial creativity. The content of the work itself matters the most to people with the technical/functional anchor. Individuals who manifest the managerial competence anchor are more excited when given the opportunity to solve problems and/or build a team to achieve a goal. While those with an entrepreneurial creativity anchor could also be considered problem solvers, they are more focused on the act of creation than on managing an existing project.