Four quadrants of career development

This article was originally published on  LinkedIn.

Back in June 2020, as we all dealt with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote a blog post about how a metaphor from strength coach Dan John helped me maintain a sense of balance in my work, study, and life: On Bus Benches and Park Benches. Another of Dan John’s coaching concepts that I often come back to when thinking about career development is his four quadrants of athletic performance. Watching the Olympics this week has made me reflect on it a little more more and inspired me share it in this post.

Dan John’s Four Quadrants

On one axis of the quadrants, illustrated above, we have the number of qualities needed, such as strength, speed, agility, power, endurance, and so on. On the other axis, we have the required level of mastery of those qualities.

Q1 is where you need to a lot of things, but don’t need to do them well. This is basic physical education and play: learning to run, jump, climb, throw, and catch.

Next is Q2, where you still need to do a lot of things, but now you need to do them extremely well, because this is how you make your living. Q2 is home to professional athletes in “collision sports” like rugby, Aussie rules football, American football, and mixed martial arts, as well as soldiers, police, and other emergency responders.

Q3 is where ordinary adults live. You do a small range of things at a reasonable level of competence but nowhere near an advanced level. You might ride your bike on the weekends, lift weights in your garage, run in 5km fun runs, or play in a social touch rugby team.

Q4 is at the edge of human performance. You have focused your training on a single task and you are better at it than most people on earth, but you only practice that one thing. Sprinters run fast, but not for long and without changing direction; weightlifters lift astounding weights above their head but care little about throwing a ball accurately.

The Four Quadrants of Career Development

So how does all this stuff about rugby players, olympic weightlifters and fun runs help me as a career development educator?

For me the four quadrants serve as a reminder that success means different things for different people, at different stages in their life, and according to the goals that are most important to and appropriate for them. Accordingly, how we support our students and clients needs to be different too.

Q1 is school. We learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. We learn how to talk to people, work in teams, manage our time, and solve problems. We’ll have our favourite tasks and subjects, sure, but now is not the time for specialisation. Importantly, if we don’t learn these qualities in school, we might never learn them.

Q1 career education exposes children to to the world of work, helping them explore and learn about the broadest range of educational and occupational pathways possible while maintaining a curious, open attitude about which might be best for them. Young people should not be asked to make career decisions too early, but rather we want to promote exploration and experimentation.

We enter Q3 in tertiary education and early employment. We choose (or stumble into) a specialty and start to narrow down the range of qualities we are trying to develop. We gain basic competence in those qualities and are accepted into a community of professional peers. Of course, some are more skilled than others, but overall, we’re all around the level of… fine. Q3 is where the majority of people spend the majority of their career.

Q3 is where we see the emergence of a career identity, as people begin to make career choices and goals. While career management tasks start to become more goal-oriented, young people should be adaptable and prepared to deal with the fact that their initial career decisions may not have been the right ones.

All young people are expected to progress from quadrant one to three, to some degree. It is in the upper quadrants were we start to pursue more specialised career goals and use more mature career management skills.

People in Q2 are multi-talented types who can understand the full breadth of knowledge needed in their field. They can operate complex systems and navigate change and uncertainty by deploying a wide range of tools. They will often move around within organisations, fixing problems or leading projects in various domains.

People in Q4 are hyper-specialised experts in very specific and very important things. They will often be at the bleeding edge of knowledge and technology, developing new tools or methods for the rest of us. Their skills and knowledge are extremely rare and therefore extremely valuable.

Q2 and Q4 require advanced career management skills. They will often require further education and training, sometimes for many years. People in these quadrants will need to draw on the full range of career resources, including human capital resources (skills and knowledge), social resources (networks and mentors), psychological resources (adaptability, optimism, confidence), and career identity resources (a sense of purpose, values).

Setting Career Goals with the Quadrants

Some prodigies will go straight into Q2 or Q4, but for most of us, getting into the upper quadrants is a long term goal. For those who aspire to move into the upper quadrants, it’s important know know which best suits them.

The first decision to make is whether you want to enter the upper quadrants at all. Doing so requires an investment of time and effort which, for some, may not be worth it. Many will opt out of striving and be content in quadrant three. Q3 has many advantages over the higher pressure Q2 and Q4, such as better work-life balance. As all those quiet-quitters have demonstrated in the last few years, there can be dignity in being average and maintaining mediocrity can be more rewarding than chasing excellence.

The labour market has high demand for both Q4 specialists and Q2 advanced generalists. The multi-skilled people in Q2 will be very mobile and able to avoid or recover from career shocks relatively easily. Those in Q4 may be in high demand and able to command a salary that reflects that while also picking and choosing what projects they take on.

Of course, there can be drawbacks too. Both Q2 and Q4 are prone to burnout. People in Q2 may find themselves being delegated everyone else’s job, because they are such a safe pair of hands. Those in Q4 are exposed to the risk of labour market disruptions, if their specialised skillset is supplanted by technology or otherwise no longer needed.

The quadrants were developed by Dan John to help him understand how best to coach different kinds of clients. Importantly, it helps him explain how unproductive it is for a Q1 child or Q3 average joe to try to train like a Q2 professional rugby player or Q4 elite powerlifter. I use them in a similar way. They help me describe some key concepts in career development, from youth to adulthood and identify some basic principles and priorities for each quadrant. I hope that this simple framework might help you identify your clients’ needs and provide support appropriate to their stage in life, their goals, and their preparedness.