Peer discovery interview

What is it all about?

WHAT IS A PEER DISCOVERY INTERVIEW?  The peer-discovery interview is conducted in pairs. It focuses on your past, present and future career background, and begins with your childhood and education. The interview focuses on the different choices you have made to date and that you plan to make in the future. The process of telling your story and listening to someone's else story helps you analyse your patterns and how they've evolved over time. 

WHY ARE DOING A PEER DISCOVERY INTERVIEW? The aim of this interview is to help both you and your partner to understand the different factors which guide and influence a career, enabling you to identify the main patterns or recurring themes that arise from the events that have taken place in your life and the reasons that underpin them.

HOW DO WE MAKE THE MOST OF IT? For each situation, we ask you to analyse the reasons that helped you to make these decisions or specific actions, and how you felt while making these choices. The interview has been purposely built within a chronological framework. It enables you to piece together your past to enable you to define the different patterns and the reasons that governed your choices. Your partner and you should be keeping an eye out for these patterns throughout the interview.
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE? Each interview will go for about 3 hours. 

WHICH QUESTIONS SHOULD I ASK? During the interview, you may be asked “what did you do or decide?” before the question of “why?” or “how/ what did you feel in relation to that?”
Please answer all the questions. The questions are in the interview guide. 

DO WE HAVE TO EXACTLY FOLLOW THE TOPICS? Be relaxed and don’t be afraid of deviating to other topics that may arise. 

WHAT IS MY ROLE  WHEN I'M THE INTERVIEWER? As a partner, you are there to help the person you are interviewing draw up a picture of her career profile so that you can identify the main patterns and themes together. You are invited to reflect on your career at the same time. 

WHEN SHOULD WE DO THE PEER DISCOVERY INTERVIEW? The interview must be conducted before workshop 4. It takes time to process, analyse and reflect on a career. The insights will form over time. We recommend that you complete the interview a few days before the next workshop. 
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Learn about career anchors

The aim of this interview is to help both you and your partner to understand the different factors which guide and influence a career. they are called career anchors.


 Did you know? Edgar Schein is a Swiss-born American academic, a former business professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who has left a notable imprint on many topics pertaining to leadership, including personal development and organisational culture. One of his most well-known concepts is the idea of career anchors. Schein suggested that each and every individual possessed specific and unique ‘anchors’; one’s perception of one’s own values, talents, abilities and motives, which form the basis of individual roles and development. Schein's original research in the 1970s identified five possible constructs upon which anchors are generally based, though this was expanded to eight following further research in the 1980s. These constructs describe the priorities individuals who possess different sets of talents, capabilities and personalities possess, and can thus be used as a basis for planning development and career changes around.