The career conversation no one has

The form is already filled in on the table before Karim sits down. Five competencies, a column for a score, a box for development goals. His manager smiles and asks: where do you see yourself in three years? Karim knows the question. He also knows the answer that is expected. What he doesn't know is why exactly this question leaves him empty year after year.

The annual career conversation often misses the real question, because it starts from role, skills and KPIs instead of from the story of the person sitting across from you. Anyone who opens a career conversation at the life story hears drivers and patterns that no competency matrix captures. The score is the beginning, the story completes it.

Why does the annual career conversation miss the real question?

In most organisations the career conversation has become a ritual. Once a year, with a form that sets the frame: performance, goals, development points. The conversation measures what you do and how well you do it, and translates that into a next step in the same direction. It is a tidy procedure. Only that procedure rarely reaches the question underneath it: does this direction still match who I am becoming?

The numbers show how often that conversation misses its aim. Research by Gallup finds that only one in four employees strongly agree they receive valuable feedback from the people they work with (Kemp, 2024). Valuable here doesn't mean more frequent or stricter, but meaningful: feedback that opens something rather than ticking something off. A yearly moment with a completed form rarely gets there.

The problem isn't measuring itself. A job profile, a competency scan or a set of goals gives language and grip, and that is valuable work. The problem arises when measuring becomes the terminus, and the person disappears behind the column in which they score.

What does a conversation that starts from role and skills miss?

What is missing is the story. Not the CV, but the line beneath it: the moments that shaped someone, the choice they keep making without noticing, the question they were already trying to answer as a child and still carry into their work.

Career psychologist Mark Savickas described a framework for this that he calls life design. A career, he argues, is built out of small stories, which you assemble into a life portrait, in order to shape the next episode from there (Savickas, 2012). The question is then no longer which role fits which skill, but which story brought someone here, and which chapter is now presenting itself. That is a different logic than the competency matrix. It doesn't look for a match, it looks for meaning.

For Karim that is the difference between two conversations. In the first he fills in a box under "development goal next year". In the second, someone would ask him why, whenever things get tense, he takes on the role of bridge-builder, and whether he chooses that role or the role chooses him. Almost no one has that second conversation.

How does a career conversation that starts from the life story unfold?

You don't need to build a new system for it. What changes is where you begin. Not at the future as an empty box waiting to be filled, but at the story that is already there.

A few questions open that conversation surprisingly fast. Which moments in your work felt like you were exactly in the right place, and what did they have in common? Which choice do you keep making, even when no one asks for it? And if you look back on your career as a story, which chapter are you writing now? These aren't questions you answer with a number. They bring the undercurrent to the surface, the drivers and patterns that determine which direction truly fits someone.

This is the same movement you see in the conversation a leader never gets: only when the story is allowed to exist does it become clear what a score merely indicates. Where a job profile shows that someone is good at connecting, the story shows why, and whether that is a strength they choose or a pattern that lives them.

What changes when the story comes first?

The career conversation that starts from the life story doesn't produce a different form, but a different relationship to one's own career. The employee turns from a collection of competencies back into a person with a direction. And the organisation hears something an annual evaluation never captures: not only whether someone performs well, but where they want to move and why.

That is precisely the layer NarraTyx works in. Around questions of career development and reorientation, the reflection instrument, inspired by narrative frameworks such as the Hero's Journey, is meant to understand without judging. It gives no number and no ranking, but anchors, tensions and the questions a career conversation rarely asks. It replaces no existing instrument, it deepens it: the score is the beginning, the story completes it.

Six months after that first conversation, Karim sat at the table again, this time without a form between them. The first question wasn't about next year, but about the road that brought him here. For the first time he felt the conversation was about him, and not about the column he fitted into.

And you? When did you last have the career conversation that started from your own story, rather than from the box still waiting to be filled in?

Sources

• Kemp, A. (2024, 23 October). Organizations can redefine feedback by including recognition. Gallup. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/651812/organizations-redefine-feedback-including-recognition.aspx
• Savickas, M. L. (2012). Life design: A paradigm for career intervention in the 21st century. Journal of Counseling & Development, 90(1), 13-19. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1556-6676.2012.00002.x