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The quest for meaning, fulfillment, recognition and new challenges are all reasons to question one’s professional future. They are also symptoms of an existential crisis that affects a majority of young adults between the age of 25 and 35, regardless of their academic background. This crisis, which echoes the “mid-life crisis”, is called the “quarter-life crisis”.

For several years now, Elizabeth TOUCAS, Executive Coach and Head of the IÉSEG Network Career Development Services , the IÉSEG Alumni Association, has been observing this trend, which is also affecting young IÉSEG graduates: 95% of the coaching requests she receives from graduates between the age of 25 and 35 are related to the need to be supported in this important stage of their lives.

Why is this crisis emerging? What are the first signs? What resources does the IÉSEG Network Career Development Services have to help its graduates through this difficult period? Elizabeth TOUCAS gives us some answers.

Why is this quarter-life crisis emerging and what are the symptoms?

In this context of uncertainty, now accelerated by the pandemic, one thing remains certain: young adults have a deep desire to reverse the models of professional success as defined by their elders, their family circle or society in general, because these models no longer match their expectations. They know that their career will no longer be linear, and rather than having one career for life, they will have several careers in their lifetime according to their desires. This quarter-life crisis is a period of transition.

In this moment of life, young adults often feel at a crossroads, a little disoriented, often demotivated and without perceiving any meaning in their daily work. A feeling of dissatisfaction and uneasiness takes hold of them, with the impression of not being in the right place and not being able to use all their potential.

An energy and a willingness to make significant changes in their lives are emerging. When they ask me for coaching, it is the first step that reveals an inner trigger and a concrete indicator of their desire to move forward.

How do you help IÉSEG graduates overcome this crisis?

In coaching, I see this moment of uncertainty experienced by these young graduates as a raw material to be shaped in order to draw the outlines of their next professional move. The core of my career guidance is to provide the graduate with an in-depth and individualized vision of his or her professional identity and the factors that contribute to his or her personal and professional development. It is essential to move towards a better understanding of oneself, one’s needs, desires, priorities, values, drivers, deep motivations and DNA of strengths.

From this perspective, my position as a coach will be invaluable. It will create the right conditions for them to leave their frame of reference and their comfort zone in order to bring out all the resources within them to access an open window of possibilities that they are not able to envision alone. Indeed, whether one is a young adult or not, embarking alone on an exercise of self-reflection is far from easy. By being alone, one will lack the necessary distance and the mirror effect for this phase of introspection to be successful.

This stage of introspection is key for them to allow themselves to be themselves, to welcome themselves in all their dimensions, without self-censorship.

How is your coaching different?

Today, young adults entering the workforce expect their professional career to be not only a vehicle for professional fulfillment but also personal fulfillment. Consequently, traditional career support solutions such as skills assessments are no longer adapted to them because they are too focused on skills and therefore on “doing”.

The career development coaching that I provide to our IÉSEG graduates is designed to meet this specific need for alignment with who they are and is distinguished from existing coaching on the market by the combination of two personalized approaches:

• Innovative Coaching based on “being” rather than “doing”. In other words, the head and the heart work together, but it is the heart that drives and not the other way around;
• Strength-based coaching using the CliftonStrengths 34 Test.

Each person has strengths and weaknesses that make up his or her personality. Our educational system teaches us to focus on our weaknesses at the expense of our strengths.

I share the position of Dr. Clifton, an American psychologist, researcher and inventor of the CliftonStrengths Test, who believes that focusing on one’s strengths is the best way to move forward, to be fulfilled and to perform well in both one’s professional and personal life. Investing in one’s strengths allows each person to fully realize his or her potential for success, and this is something that must be done at all times!

The CliftonStrengths Test, a psychometric tool from the American GALLUP Institute, defines a common language of characteristics of excellence through 34 strengths grouped into 4 distinct areas: Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building and Strategic Thinking.

Based on the analysis of the results of the introspection phase and their strengths DNA generated by this Test, I enhance the uniqueness of graduates through the identification of their natural recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behavior.

This new self-knowledge, refined through the prism of their strengths, will lead to the definition of a more coherent professional project that is more in line with their inner self. This will be followed by a joint exploration of the different types of jobs, fields and even organizations where their strengths are likely to be valued.

In the end, this quarter-life crisis is an essential prelude to the development of young adults…

Because a crisis always contains a hidden gift, like the oyster that, after a long process, transforms a grain of sand into a beautiful pearl, the quarter-life crisis that affects young potentials between the age of 25 and 35 is a necessary gestational period to find solutions to their own needs, an essential prelude to their personal and professional growth.

This is why the IÉSEG Network Career Development Services makes it a point of honor to support all graduates of the School in their professional careers, regardless of their stage of development. They are welcomed without judgment in an open, caring and strictly confidential environment, so that each one can reveal who they really are and express the full power of their potential and their creative energy to achieve their goals.

For more information, please contact Elizabeth TOUCAS – e.toucas@ieseg.fr