Hyung Joon Yoon knew early in life while attending Korea University that he wanted to instill hopes and dreams in youth all over the world and present ways to achieve those. His time spent serving in the Korean military forces only solidified his goal to pursue human resource development.
Yoon, associate professor of education and professor-in-charge of the Workforce Education and Development program in the Department of Learning and Performance Systems within Penn State’s College of Education, was “half military personnel (ROTC) and half student” while in college and was mandated to join the Korean Army prior to attending graduate school. He became an artillery officer but said he carried his mission statement every day in his pocket.
“I laminated it and I put my quarterly goals and what I should do at the individual level, family organization and the nation and the world; I had those contents and I looked at it every day,” Yoon explained.
“I was an artillery officer, which is very different from career development or helping people to achieve their dreams, but my entire mission was to help the soldiers to be ready for the civilian life,” Yoon said. “It is mandatory for Korean men to serve the military for two years. In many cases, people consider that those times are wasted. But in fact, you can learn a lot from the military, and I wanted to help the men to grow and be ready for the life after their military service.”
At the battalion level, Yoon volunteered to become a troop information education officer because of the job’s inclusive components of ideological, spiritual and character education as well as being in constant contact with soldiers. He administered psychological assessments under orders to identify soldiers with suicidal symptoms.
Yoon said the assessment enabled him to see other soldiers at risk, but he was frustrated by a lack of a solution. “At one point there was a notice from the division leader to gather those people who are identified as having high risk to commit suicide. They participated in a marathon group session – like 20 hours — delivered by the chaplain, and they became totally different,” Yoon said.
“After the program, those (suicidal urges) went away; it was a miracle to see so I decided to learn about those. I volunteered to learn because of my prior knowledge about counseling. I also practiced other assessments and mechanisms including transactional analyses. I learned from the chaplain about how to deliver it and he trained me, and I ran three group sessions. It was highly successful, and I trained people from other battalions so that they could run the program at their battalions.”
Yoon said he was later approached by a soldier at an event for commissioned and noncommissioned officers who told him that his program had changed his life.
“That was really a very, very fulfilling moment for me, and when I think about it, even now, I get motivated to keep going with the direction,” he said.
“The reason that I'm in the career development field is that it is highly personal and is about meaning making. If you go in depth regarding one's career development, helping them to understand themselves is critical. And I go deep into exploring their motives, their values and their life themes — things like that — and I help them to envision or plan their future based on their uniqueness,” he added.
Yoon studied human resource development in graduate school and was hired by LG Display as a leadership development person on the management training team. “My desire to learn about career development didn't stop, and because there was no quality program regarding career development, I decided to come to the United States and study at Penn State,” he said.
When Yoon first arrived at Penn State as a graduate student, he collaborated with Spencer Niles, a department head and professor of counselor education as well as a past president of the National Career Development Association at the time. Niles looked favorably upon an assessment of human agency tool Yoon had created and collaboratively integrated its components of self-reflectiveness, forethought, intentionality and reactiveness into a career development model and an assessment tool.
Borne from that collaboration was Hope-Action Theory, and that model has these elements:
- Hope: Having positive expectations about the future;
- Self-reflection: Reflecting on thoughts, feelings, behaviors, characteristics, the environment and history as an individual and as a collective entity;
- Self-clarity: Having a clear understanding of the identity of the self in relation to one’s environment;
- Visioning: Envisioning potential future scenarios based on self-clarity;
- Goal-setting and planning: Determining the critical steps in shaping the desired future and creating action plans to achieve them;
- Implementing: Translating the goals and plans into action; and
- Adapting: Modifying a course of action in response to internal or external changes.
“In order to take a step forward, you have to have some level of hope,” Yoon said. “Hope at the center works like a linchpin. Without hope those components may fall apart. Hope is the kind of mechanism that holds everything together and we put a high emphasis on the impact of environment.”
The interventions are helpful for one’s employment as well, according to Yoon. “These hope-action competencies could be used for planning, or organization development; the model is not just about career development, it has potential to be expanded to other levels of human systems, such as groups, organizations, and societies,” he said.
“I introduced three different types of hope that Peter Drahos conceptualized: private hope that the individual possesses; public hope, meaning that's something that decision-makers or politicians communicate through policy or laws or regulations; and collective hope that people within the community or organization or nation or state have collectively.”
Yoon said that while practitioners worldwide practice hope-action theory-based career development, his research work at Penn State is unique.
“I have a stronger identity as a researcher. My approach has been evidence-based practice and I tried to measure the impact of Hope-Action Theory-based interventions,” he said. “I'm also in the process of exploring what helps individuals develop a hopeful career state and what the impact of it is. I created a path model that starts within the organization context. So, at the moment, my students, collaborators and I are the only ones, I guess, who explore the impact of hope, or the antecedents of hope, or hopeful career state in an organizational setting.”
He said the path model starts with organizational career support, and his literature review with his doctoral students identified 35 different organizational human resource practices that can help employees’ career development.
“I call it as organizational career support practices. I can measure how well the organization implements those practices,” Yoon said. “What I measure next is perceived supervisor support, because what I found over the years is that supervisors create the hopeful environment for their employees. And to what extent they care about employees’ careers affects the level of work engagement of the employees.”
He has an ongoing study in the U.S. as well as six European countries within the hospitality industry to see the impact or role that hopeful career state plays. Other studies include what helped or hindered nurses during COVID-19, and how organizations, leaders and employees themselves helped them to be hopeful about their career during the pandemic.
“Through my recent research, I found if individuals are hopeful at work, they will perform better. We tried to educate those organizations, leaders and employees about creating a hopeful career and a hopeful workplace,” Yoon said.
“I want our students to go through an in-depth career planning process. We talk about HR and how we can offer interventions to employees from a HR perspective and not counseling or coaching perspective,” he added. “I cannot resist asking ‘what do you want to do in the future?’ And I want to help them to see bright futures, and I want to help them achieve those.”