If your career anchor is competence in some technical or functional area, what you would not give up is the opportunity to apply your skills in that area and to continue to develop those skills to an ever higher level. You derive your sense of identity from the exercise of your skills and are most happy when your work permits you to be challenged in those areas. You may be willing to manage others in your technical or functional area, but you are not interested in management for its own sake and would avoid general management because you would have to leave your own area of expertise.

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If your career anchor is general managerial competence, what you would not give up is the opportunity to climb to a level high enough in an organization to enable you to integrate the efforts of others across functions and to be responsible for the output of a particular unit of the organization. You want to be responsible and accountable for total results and you identify your own work with the success of the organization for which you work. If you are presently in a technical or functional area, you view that as a necessary learning experience; however your ambition is to get to a generalist job as soon as possible. Being at a high managerial level in a function does not interest you.

If your career anchor is autonomy/independence, what you would not give up is the opportunity to define your own work in your own way. If you are in an organization, you want to remain in jobs that allow you flexibility regarding when and how to work. If you cannot stand organizational rules and restrictions to any degree, you seek occupations in which you will have the freedom you seek, such as teaching or consulting. You turn down opportunities for promotion or advancement in order to retain autonomy. You may even seek to have a business of your own in order to achieve a sense of autonomy; however, this motive is not the same as the entrepreneurial creativity described later.

If your career anchor is security/stability, what you would not give up is employment security or tenure in a job or organization. Your main concern is to achieve a sense of having succeeded so that you can relax. The anchor shows up in concern for financial security (such as pension and retirement plans) or employment security. Such stability may involve trading your loyalty and willingness to do whatever the employer wants from you for some promise of job tenure. You are less concerned with the content of your work and the rank you achieve in the organization, although you may achieve a high level if your talents permit. As with autonomy, everyone has certain needs for security and stability, especially at times when financial burdens may be heavy or when one is facing retirement. People anchored in this way, however, are always concerned with these issues and build their entire self-images around the management of security and stability.

If your career anchor is entrepreneurial creativity, what you would not give up is the opportunity to create an organization or enterprise of your own, built on your own abilities and your willingness to take risks and to overcome obstacles. You want to prove to the world that you can create an enterprise that is the result of your own effort. You may be working for others in an organization while you are learning and assessing future opportunities, but you will go out on your own as soon as you feel you can manage it. You want your enterprise to be financially successful as proof of your abilities.

If your career anchor is service/dedication to a cause, what you would not give up is the opportunity to pursue work that achieves something of value, such as making the world a better place to live, solving environmental problems, improving harmony among people, helping others, improving people’s safety, curing diseases through new products, and so on. You pursue such opportunities even if it means changing organizations, and you do not accept transfers or promotions that would take you out of work that fulfils those values.

Pure Challenge

If your career anchor is pure challenge, what you would not give up is the opportunity to work on to seemingly unsolvable problems, to win out over tough opponents, or to overcome difficult obstacles. For you the only meaningful reason for pursuing a job or career is that it permits you to win out over the impossible. Some people find such pure challenge in intellectual kinds of work, such as the engineer who is only interested in impossibly difficult designs; some find the challenge in complex multifaceted situations, such as the strategy consultant who is only interested in clients who are about to go bankrupt and have exhausted all other resources; some find it in interpersonal competition, such as the professional athlete or the salesperson who defines every sale as either a win or a loss. Novelty, variety, and difficulty become ends in themselves, and if something is easy it becomes immediately boring.

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Lifestyle

If your career anchor is lifestyle, what you would not give up is a situation that permits you to balance and integrate your personal needs, your family needs, and the requirements of your career. You want to make all of the major sectors of your life work together toward an integrated whole, and you therefore need a career situation that provides enough flexibility to achieve such integration. You may have to sacrifice some aspects of the career (for example, a geographical move that would be a promotion but would upset your total life situation), and you define success in terms broader than just career success. You feel that your identity is more tied up with how you live your total life, where you settle, how you deal with your family situation, and how you develop yourself than with any particular job or organization.

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