Design Education and Learning
Junior designers’ awareness of personal values and their employment choices
Anna Jonkmans, Julia Wurl, Dirk Snelders, Lenny van Onselen
TU Delft (3), The Hague University of Applied Sciences
h.m.j.j.snelders@tudelft.nl
Keywords: design management, industrial design, marketing, consumer products
Abstract
For junior designers, friction between personal and organizational values can lead to frustration. This paper addresses job selection choices of junior designers, and how they are affected by an awareness of personal values. An experiment (n=106) shows how an explicit awareness of personal values (based on the Schwartz Value Survey) affects the choices and motivations of junior designers. Results show that, overall, junior designers select vacancies that express values that are congruent with their own values. In addition, a greater awareness of personal values is found to lead to more confidence in one’s choice, and to a greater tendency to look for a match between personal and organizational values based on complementarity (rather than congruence). These findings are to help junior designers to make professional choices based on personal values and ambitions, promoting the best fit for their first job.
This paper is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.
→ download the paper (PDF)
Cite this paper: Jonkmans, A., Wurl, J., Snelders, D., van Onselen, L. (2016). Junior designers’ awareness of personal values and their employment choices. Proceedings of DRS 2016, Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference. Brighton, UK, 27–30 June 2016.
This paper will be presented at DRS2016, find it in the conference programme