What's a career river and how can you explore yours? A Q&A with Bridget Thoreson
'I’m rejecting the career ladder metaphor in favor of the career river. Here’s why,' Thoreson posted on social media
A big thank you goes out to Bridget Thoreson, who writes the Explore Your Career River newsletter, for sharing insights on a different way to chart a career path that takes into account how people grow and change so they can find more fulfilling work in a supportive environment.
Thoreson is a journalist who shared that she’s “worked with more than 130 newsrooms on community engagement and collaborative journalism strategies.”
Can you explain the concept of a career river and how you developed the idea?
What if we freed ourselves from the burden of climbing to the top of the career ladder and instead explore how our interests and skills can flow into new possibilities over the course of our careers? That’s what the career river framework makes possible.
The career river examines how we chart our course, find our flow and navigate obstacles, and the ways this approach opens new possibilities for connections within a larger ecosystem. You can get started with a 10-minute mapping exercise to uncover patterns that point to the types of work you would be most interested in pursuing.
I started developing this idea when speaking to journalism students about my work in community engagement, telling them I believed our professional lives were not a linear path but a fertile river delta, with many possible routes to pursue. But the career river really came together for me during the pandemic lockdown. I was struggling to hit the success bar every day while working full-time and homeschooling my two young kids, and in a moment of overwhelm my kindergartener told me I had “too many feelings” and I should put them in the future. That really struck me, and literally the day they went back to school I wrote a highly caffeinated and passionate thread on the career river.
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