4.1: What is a Self-Portrait?

As discussed in the previous chapter, the creation of a Self-Portrait is a career development process designed by Redekopp, Day, Magnusson, and Durnford (1993) to facilitate self-assessment and career exploration without relying on traditional testing methods.

The process adopts a developmental approach to career assistance, encouraging individuals to engage in a comprehensive self-examination process.

Creating Self-Portraits is a method to help people recognize how they are changing and growing. It helps them answer the following questions:

• Who are they now?
• What skills do they have?
• What do they know?
• In what direction are they headed?
• What’s important to them?

With a clear picture of where they started, people can track their development and see progression — not once, but continually.

Creating Self-Portraits provides facilitators with a method for identifying and organizing components of their clients’ work, hobbies, and lives without suggesting occupational alternatives or classifying clients into types.

Components of a Self-Portrait

This process involves exploring four key aspects of the self:

• meaningfulness (values, interests, beliefs, and barriers)
• outcomes or goals for work and life
• activities that the individual has engaged in or wants to engage in
• skills that the individual has or needs to carry out desired activities

As these components are identified and organized, a detailed profile of the client called a Self-Portrait emerges.

Characteristics of a Self-Portrait

• The Self-Portrait can be used to make decisions, whether work-related or not.
• The Self-Portrait evolves over time, allowing clients to add, subtract, and reorganize information to best capture their changing selves.
• The Self-Portrait moves clients away from preoccupations with job titles and encourages them instead to focus on what they want to do in work and life.

This opens the door to allow facilitators to help their clients develop career paths rather than select an occupational destination. In a rapidly changing world, people need the ability to set multiple goals, develop multiple pathways to those goals, and make use of chance opportunities as they arise. Occupations thus become steppingstones rather than destinations. Creating Self-Portraits helps with this by enabling clients to understand themselves in open, fluid and flexible ways.

The Self-Portrait is an excellent tool, though not a career development panacea. Remember that:

• A Self-Portrait is simply a tool — one of many that can be combined with good career facilitation skills and methods.
• The client is always more important than a method or tool. If creating Self-Portraits does not seem to help a client, do something else. Or, if the format (i.e., columns of information) of the Self-Portrait doesn’t seem to be useful for a client, change the format (e.g., create circles or visual collages).

Depending on your work with people, you may or may not have time to develop Self-Portraits with your clients. However, if you are feeling pressed for time, it might be helpful to remember that Self-Portraits can be created at various levels of detail. A Self-Portrait can be useful even if it remains general, so remember to adapt the tool to meet your client’s needs.