Career Design & Career Archetypes

What is career design?

Career design is a framework for career development that focus on empowerment and exploring our complex world with creativity, adaptability, and empathy. It’s a holistic approach that focuses on your unique aspirations, values, and strengths to focus on a life and a career that fits you, not to fit you into a career.

An image with the title "career design." There are six colored vertical bands, each with a character and description in them. A blue band is titled "Empathize" with the subtitle "Inward Adventurer" and has an image of a deer in a hoodie sitting in front of a campfire. The second is a yellow band titled "Define," subtitled, "Mapmaker" and has an image of a bear with a backpack looking at a map. The third is red, titled "Ideate", subtitled "Community explorer" and has an image of fox and a deer around a campfire drinking from mugs. The fourth is orange and titled "Prototype," subtitled "Taste Tester" and has an image of a mole popping up from the ground holding a potato. The fifth is colored green,, titled "Test," subtitled "Experimenter" and has an image of frog with a net chasing bugs. The last band is colored maroon, titled "Launch," subtitled "Voyager," and has an image of a rabbit in scout attire carrying a rolled piece of paper.

What are career archetypes?

Career archetypes are characters that represent different places you’ll be in your career design journey. They can help you understand what you know, what you don’t know, and what your next steps will be. Each archetype represents a piece of the career designing process you’ll engage in.

We call these archetypes for a reason – we know they are not a “one size fits most” approach and use these as models and examples. Think of it as a “you are here” marker rather than a “you are this”.

Where are you in your journey?

Scroll through the gallery below and note which image or images resonate most with you. Want a more in-depth breakdown of the archetypes and design steps? View our career design document which will describe each step and show tools to use to help you with that stage.

Will I be the same career archetype forever?

No! At times, you may be a combination of them, or you may find yourself moving back and forth through them as you change your mind, test new things, and even change career paths entirely!

Use the visual below to help identify how you might move through career designing while at Augsburg:

Want to see more steps in the career design process? View our career planning resource to explore what exploration options are available to you or meet with a career coach!