CAREER THEORY AND CONCEPT

• Career Perspectives - they help us to understand how careers are evolving in the twenty-first century
• Career Perspectives - these approaches provide a framework for more research on careers, which ultimately should broaden our knowledge and practice of career development
• Protean Career by Hall (1976) - a process which the person, not the organization, is managing
• Values Driven Dimension - one’s internal values drive how a person views one’s career and its development
• Self-Directed Career Management - an individual is responsible for his/ her career choices and development
• Protean Career by Briscoe and Hall - a mindset about careers more than anything else.  It is an attitude toward the career that reflects freedom, self-direction, and making choices based on one’s personal values
• Protean Career by Briscoe, Heangan, Burton, & Murphy (2012) - It is an “internally focused” career orientation, reinforcing that the individual determines his/her own career path, rather than relying on direction from organizational systems
• Boundaryless Career - characterized as one of independence from, rather than dependence on, traditional career arrangements
• The development of the Boundaryless Career Attitudes scale provided a way to measure psychological mobility. This scale measures both a “boundaryless mindset,” which is the “attitude that people hold toward initiating and pursuing work-related relationships across boundaries,” as well as “organizational mobility preference,” which is the amount of interest one might have regarding actual movement
• The boundaryless mindset and mobility preference have been found to be related to certain personality characteristics, career competencies, and motivators
• Verbruggen (2012) found that having a boundaryless mindset led to tangible indicators of career success (e.g., increased promotions and salaries); however, having an organizational mobility preference tended to result in fewer promotions, and lower job and career satisfaction
• Organizational Career  - most social phenomena, the nature of the organizational career has changed
• New Organizational Career including:

  • continuity in employment, “long-term” rather than “lifetime”employment
  • flexibility and adaptability on the part of employees to handle change
  • medium-term tenure across different roles
  • loyalty to organization and to outside groups
  • jointly managed career (both organizational and self)
  • development to meet both organization and individual needs
  • career focus that is both internal and external to the organization
  • relational employment contract
  • both objective and subjective measures of success
• Kaleidoscope Career - describes how individuals change the pattern of their career by rotating the varied aspects of their lives to arrange their relationships and roles in new ways
• Three Parameters: Authenticity - making choices that allow one to be true to oneself
• Three Parameters: Balance - making choices that allow an individual to balance both work and nonwork responsibilities
• Three Parameters: Challenge - making choices that provide interesting and stimulating work, and opportunities to advance in one’s career and continually develop
• Early Stage - women place a high emphasis on searching for challenges and making significant progress in their careers. This period is often defined by high ambition and determination
• Middle Stage - balance becomes more important. This can often be attributed to the additional responsibilities women might undertake during this phase, such as starting a family, however the research showed that this was also true for women who didn’t have children
• Later Stage -  authenticity becomes the primary focus. Women begin to seek deeper alignment between their work and personal values. At this stage, work isn't just about responsibility; it's about engagement and meaning
• Career Success -  a positive outcome of a career experience and as a process of achieving work-related goals
• Subjective Career Success - internally focused, meaning it is an individual’s unique and personal assessment of his or her career
• Objective Career Success - include those indicators of achievement that are more tangible and externally focused
• Subjective career success has most commonly been conceived as a sign of career satisfaction (Heslin, 2005), although other judgments like the value of individuals’ human capital and self-appraisals of one’s efficacy and capabilities would also be considered measures (Stumpf & Tymon, 2012)
• Common indicators of objective career success include salary, promotions, and occupational status—all of which can be assessed by others (Ng, Eby, Sorensen, & Feldman, 2005). It is important to recognize that these two types of career success are interdependent; for example, objective indicators of success are likely to influence subjective factors such as career satisfaction
• Career Competencies - develop over time and are important to both individuals working to acquire the necessary capabilities to facilitate their careers and to organizations attempting to attract and develop talent
• Three major career competencies: know-why, know-how, and know-whom
• Their alternative model identified seven career competencies:

  1. goal setting and career planning
  2. self-knowledge (e.g., of interests, values, strengths, weaknesses)
  3. job-related performance effectiveness
  4. career-related skills (e.g., seeking out development opportunities)
  5. knowledge of (office) politics
  6. career guidance and networking
  7. feedback seeking and self-presentation
• Career Transition - events or non-events in the career development process causing changes in the meaning of the career, one’s self assumptions, and view of the world
• Common career transitions experienced by many individuals include initial career choice, entry into the organization, reassessment of career, involuntary job loss, and retirement
• Three Important Factors that will cause equilibrium to be disrupted: Structural Factors - economic conditions, societal characteristics (e.g., war, technology breakthroughs, social movements), industry differences (e.g., male or female dominated, compensation practices, industry growth), and staffing policies within organizations (e.g., internal mobility options)
• Three Important Factors that will cause equilibrium to be disrupted: Individual Differences - personality traits, career interests, values, and attachment styles
• Three Important Factors that will cause equilibrium to be disrupted: Decisional Perspective - suggesting that intentions to make a transition are determined by subjective norms about the change (e.g., popularity of a particular type of job mobility make it easier to change), desirability of mobility, and readiness for change
• Three Most Common Challenges Perceived by the Respondents all focused:

  • on lack of knowledge — lack of knowledge regarding career paths
  • unfamiliarity with the environment and the mechanism of career transition
  • lack of industry knowledge and experience
• Career Identity - resembles constructs like role identity, occupational identity, and organizational identity in that they all refer to how people define themselves in a particular work context
• Career Identity - is inherently longitudinal because it involves making sense of one’s past and present and giving direction to one’s future
• Three Adaptive Behaviors:

  • observing successful role models
  • experimenting with provisional selves (either by imitating role models or through experimenting to find their authentic style or approach)
  • evaluating the results through internal standards and feedback from others
• physical mobility - moving across jobs, occupations, countries, etc.
• psychological mobility - the capacity to move as seen through the mind of the career actor
• Organizational Career - Clarke explained that there are indications that over time the organizational career has evolved into a new hybrid form which combines aspects of the old bureaucratic career, while incorporating other dimensions more commonly associated with the ‘new careers’