#374 How biases can get in the way of your career development
Nov 21, 2023
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The podcast discusses biases that hinder career development, including affinity bias, confirmation bias, and recency bias. The hosts share personal experiences and offer actionable steps to escape their influence. They emphasize the importance of challenging assumptions and reflecting on past experiences to overcome biases.
Affinity bias can limit career development by creating an echo chamber within our career community, but we can overcome it by seeking out diverse perspectives and collaborations.
Confirmation bias can hinder career development by preventing us from being open to new opportunities and different ways of doing things, but we can combat it by challenging our assumptions and considering alternative perspectives.
Deep dives
Affinity Bias
Affinity bias occurs when we seek out and feel more comfortable with people who have things in common with us, such as shared experiences, values, or backgrounds. This bias can limit our learning and career development by creating an echo chamber within our career community, focusing on strong ties rather than weak ties, and hindering our ability to collaborate with people who are different from us. To increase awareness of affinity bias, we can scan for similarity in the 10 people we spend the most time with and take action by escaping our function and spending time with people from other departments or industries.
Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is when we search for and prioritize information that confirms our pre-existing views. This bias can limit our career development by creating a blueprint or formula for our career based on past experiences and preventing us from being open to new opportunities and different ways of doing things. To combat confirmation bias, we can play devil's advocate with our own development, challenge our assumptions, and consider alternative perspectives to ensure we are not stuck in repetitive patterns.
Recency Bias
Recency bias is the tendency to place more importance on recent events when making decisions or evaluations. This bias can hinder our career development by focusing only on recent achievements or experiences and disregarding the broader context of our past accomplishments. To overcome recency bias, we can keep a development diary to capture and reflect on a range of experiences and achievements rather than just relying on our short-term memory.
Conclusion
In this podcast episode, the hosts discussed three biases that can hold back career development: affinity bias, confirmation bias, and recency bias. They provided insights into the impact of these biases on learning, opportunities, and decision-making, as well as practical actions to increase awareness and counteract their effects. By recognizing and actively addressing these biases, individuals can navigate their squiggly careers with greater clarity, confidence, and control.
This week, Helen and Sarah talk about the biases that can hold your career development back. They explore the issues that affinity bias, confirmation bias and recency bias can cause, sharing their own experiences of these at work. They then talk about how to increase your awareness of these biases and what actions you can take if you think they may be getting in your way.
There are lots of useful actions in this week's PodSheet - head to https://www.amazingif.com/listen/ to download.
More ways to learn about Squiggly Careers:
1.Sign up for our Squiggly Careers Skills Sprint: https://bit.ly/scskills-sprint