Career Purpose and Payoff: A Balanced Scorecard Approach

Kaitlin Dumont, Director, Workforce Learning Innovation, Kaplan

How individuals can learn from successful businesses to make holistic education and career decisions.

The path to success in life is simple, right? Work hard, go to college, get a good job, and live happily ever after. But this old-fashioned sequence is increasingly less straightforward, if it ever was. Remember, fewer than half of all Americans have college degrees. Decisions about the best approach to education and career preparation abound. Degree or non-degree certificate? Liberal arts or technical education? Programs taught by universities or programs taught by corporations, like Google? What has the best payoff? Which route should I take?

What if we are asking the wrong questions? Or, to be more precise, how do we know which factors to include in our thinking given our highly personal goals and preferences? Faced with so many decisions, making the right choices depends on creating a tailored road map for each individual. With the right inputs, we can give people what they really need to navigate education and career inflection points: a personalized guiding star.

The immediate challenge that needs to be overcome is the current tendency to focus solely on financial return on investment, especially when thinking about the value of a degree or a specific major. This emphasis is understandable. The majority of individuals pursue postsecondary education to get a good or better job, and with the cost of college continuing to rise, ROI is top-of-mind for all. Organizations like Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce have done critical work on this front, including ranking the ROI of 4,500 US Colleges and Universities across several dimensions.

Yet this perspective is also incomplete. There’s more to a career than just the financial bottom line. Economic mobility is a critical piece of this puzzle, to be sure, but it is just one piece. For a growing number of people, finding purpose in work matters more than ever. The pandemic put a spotlight on workforce issues that have long been dormant, from work/life balance to sustaining mental health to the appeal of working from anywhere. These priorities are heightened with the entrance of Gen-Z to the workforce, bringing high expectations for personal choice and autonomy as they make education and career decisions. Today’s workers need holistic help matching their strengths, values, and interests —- as well as financial aspirations — to their career outcomes.

“Today’s workers need holistic help matching their strengths, values, and interests —- as well as financial aspirations — to their career outcomes.”

One promising idea for addressing challenges like this is the “Balanced Scorecard” framework from the business world. Two early thinkers in what is known today as the stakeholder capitalism movement, David P. Norton and Robert S. Kaplan, outlined this thinking just over 30 years ago. They wrote in Harvard Business Review that managers “should not have to choose between financial and operational measures.” Using a collection of connected measures that matter to business — from financial goals to customer perceptions to strategically using innovation — they created a balanced scorecard to quantify how a firm creates and captures value. They compared this series of indicators to an airplane cockpit: Pilots, like business leaders, need detailed individual measures while comparing performance across multiple areas simultaneously.

What if we had a similar balanced scorecard for individuals as they think about how they want to create and capture value for their educational and career aspirations? The goal would be to add a measure of meaning and purpose to quality of life, resulting in balancing the critical economic outcomes of these decisions with these other equally critical factors. As management guru Peter Drucker famously said, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” With a balanced scorecard to measure and guide these important career and education decisions, we stand a much better chance of managing the ensuing results, and avoiding the worst-case scenario of investing time and money into a career path that isn’t the right fit, and burning out six months into a new job.

The good news is that we don’t have to start creating this balanced scorecard from scratch. Several compelling models and pilots already show the way. Last year, for example, Strada Education Network released a report that called for alumni perceptions to be added to earnings and completion data for postsecondary education or training programs in order to integrate economic outcomes and personal fulfillment. Similarly, university career services offices are taking a more holistic view in supporting their students in career path discovery. For example, Bates College has rebranded its career services office, the “Center for Purposeful Work” with the mission of “aligning who you are with what you do.”

Forward-thinking companies are adopting a holistic approach for working adult learners, too. Take Amazon’s flagship Career Choice program for employee education and training. In addition to a robust portfolio of degree and non-degree offerings offered through its educational benefits program, Amazon partnered with Kaplan to provide deep coaching and advising to these learners to ensure they are meeting all of their career goals, and have support from the start of their journeys to the ends.

While these holistic approaches are still very much a work in progress, early successes give us reason to keep finding ways to balance all the varied measures that lead to a career path. The next step will be to standardize, consolidate, and scale the most successful initiatives. That will give individual learners — much like successful firms employing a balanced scorecard approach — all the data points they need, to make well-informed and well-rounded education and work decisions.

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