Career Genogram

A live career genogram, prefilled with a fictional family across three generations of work. Every person is annotated with their occupation — replace the notes with your own family's and the pattern usually appears quickly.

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Drag people to arrange. Click a person to edit their details.

Editable preview — your changes aren't saved here.

Quick start

Add people with the ▢ ◯ ◇ buttons, then click the canvas.
Use Connect… for marriages, children, and emotional lines.
Click a person to edit name, years, deceased, notes.
Drag to arrange, or hit Auto-arrange.
Export as PNG or PDF — the legend builds itself.

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includes watermark

Includes a title block and an auto-generated legend of the symbols you used.

What a career genogram is for

A career genogram is an ordinary genogram whose annotation layer holds occupations instead of symptoms. It is used in career counseling — the technique is associated with Harold Okiishi, who described the genogram as a career counseling tool — on the premise that career choices are made inside a family context, not in a vacuum. People inherit assumptions about what counts as real work, which fields are respectable, whether security or autonomy is the goal, and what constitutes falling short.

Those assumptions are usually invisible to the person holding them. Written across three generations on one page, they become discussable.

What to annotate

Occupation, in the family's own words. "Machinist, 38 years" carries more than "manufacturing" — tenure, specificity and pride are part of the data.
Trajectory, not just endpoint. Career changes, promotions into management, demotions, business ownership, redundancies and periods out of work.
Education reached. Especially where a generation was the first to reach a given level, which tends to carry heavy expectation forward.
Unpaid and invisible work. Caregiving, farm work, running the books for a family business. Recording it as "homemaker" alone erases the part that often explains the most.

Reading the example

In the fictional family above, the paternal line is skilled trades — Walter a machinist for thirty-eight years, his son Dale a welder with his own shop — while Gary moved from that world into mechanical engineering. The maternal line runs farming and teaching into nursing, with Susan progressing into management. Jordan, the index person, is undecided between design and physical therapy, and Ellis is an apprentice electrician.

Two patterns are legible. Each generation on the paternal side converted manual skill into slightly more formal credentialing, which frames Jordan's hesitation as continuing a trajectory rather than breaking one. And the emotional lines matter: conflict with the engineer father and closeness to the nurse mother sit directly on top of the two options Jordan is weighing. The diagram does not resolve that — it just stops the question from being asked in the abstract.

Questions to ask of it

What work was considered respectable in this family, and what was not spoken about? Who was held up as the success, and by which measure — money, stability, independence, service? Was any field explicitly closed off? Where did education function as the route upward, and for whom? Which person's working life do you most want to resemble, and which least? And the question that usually produces the most: whose approval are you imagining when you picture telling the family your choice?

The cultural genogram applies the same annotation approach to ethnicity, migration and language. For the underlying notation see the symbols reference or the condensed key; for layout, 3-generation genogram; and for the general walkthrough, how to make a genogram.

Career genogram FAQ

›What is a career genogram?

It is a genogram annotated with occupations rather than clinical information, used in career counseling to surface the family patterns and messages influencing someone's work choices. The technique is associated with Harold Okiishi, who described using the genogram as a career counseling tool.

›What do you write on a career genogram?

For each person, their main occupation or occupations, plus anything that explains the trajectory: education reached, career changes, periods of unemployment, business ownership, military service, and unpaid work such as caregiving or farming that a job title alone would miss.

›What is the purpose of a career genogram?

To make explicit the family expectations a person is deciding within — which fields were treated as respectable or off-limits, whether status came from stability or independence, and who they are consciously or unconsciously modelling. Choices tend to look less arbitrary once the pattern is on the page.

›How do I use a career genogram with a client or student?

Have them fill in occupations for three generations, then ask what each person's work meant inside the family rather than what it paid. The productive material is usually in the messages — what was praised, warned against, or never discussed — and in noticing where the client's own inclination sits relative to those.