Ch. 10: Career development
Chapter 10 discusses career development as an HPWP. Learning goals: adopting a multiple-stakeholder perspective on careers; understanding the importance of career research for HRM; outlining theoretical frameworks on careers; evaluating the sustainable career framework; considering the importance of employability for sustainable career development; and the challenges of ageing at work.
1. Conceptualization of career
Career refers to the evolving sequence of a person's work-related experiences over time (Arthur et al., 1989, p. 8).
- A career is not a static, momentary issue; it involves continuity and change. To understand a career, we need to look at its development over time.
- A career is not confined to paid work: activities and experiences such as parenting at home or pursuing a hobby may become the basis of someone's career.
- Psychological approaches lie at the heart of careers and can be divided into career choice and career development. In contemporary careers this distinction blurs, because people make choices throughout their working life.
- Van der Heijden (2005) advocated a non-normative approach to career development: there is no single 'right' career path (e.g., upward in one organization); every sequence can be meaningful.
Reflection questions: are you actively investing time and energy in your career decision-making? What concrete activities are you undertaking?
2. History of the careers domain
Early 1900s: the role of individual differences in occupational (vocational) choice (e.g., Parsons, 1909; Thorndike, 1914).
- Super's theory of vocational development (1957, 1969): five life stages: growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance and decline.
- Holland's theory of vocational choice (1959): six personality types reflected in vocational interests: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising and conventional (RIASEC).
The underlying notion was that individuals strive for lifetime employment and must prepare to make a well-thought-out choice after their education to move into a long-term, stable employment relationship (De Vos et al., 2019).
1980s: Schein launched his work on career anchors, a more individual and dynamic perspective. Whereas Holland focused on work design aspects that determine an individual's fit, Schein concentrates on the evolving nature of a person's career-related values and motives. Eight career anchors (Schein, 1996): autonomy, security, functional competence, managerial competence, entrepreneurial creativity, service, challenge and lifestyle. (The book contains a Career Anchors Inventory test.)
1990s: new career models better attuned to the 'New Economy'. Arthur et al. (1999) argued that traditional notions of careers were rooted in the stable conditions of the Industrial State model of the twentieth century. They conceptualized careers as actions rather than structures, as means of learning rather than means of earning, and as boundaryless rather than constrained. New career concepts:
| Concept | Author | Core idea |
|---|---|---|
| Boundaryless career | Arthur (1994) | Careers cross boundaries between employers, occupations and industries; mobility and networks instead of one employer |
| Protean career | Hall (1976, 2002) | Career driven by the individual's own values and self-direction; the person, not the organization, manages the career |
| Kaleidoscope career | Mainiero and Sullivan (2005) | People shift the pattern of their career over time, balancing authenticity, balance and challenge |
| Customized career | Valcour et al. (2007) | Career patterns tailored to individual needs, e.g., part-time periods, breaks, reduced hours |
| Post-corporate career | Peiperl and Baruch (1997) | Careers outside traditional large organizations, e.g., self-employment, small firms, project work |
These concepts respond to the changing employment relationship; individual agency was stressed as the key element of successfully developing a career. Because of this focus on motivation and behaviour, career research became increasingly intertwined with work psychology.
2000s: this link continued. Topics: psychological career success, employability development and individual career management behaviours. Current topics: subjective career success perceptions, such as meaningful work, impactful work and valuable social relationships at work.
3. Sustainable careers
'Sequences of career experiences reflected through a variety of patterns of continuity over time, thereby crossing several social spaces, characterized by individual agency, herewith providing meaning to the individual' (Van der Heijden and De Vos, 2015, p. 7).
Adding sustainability to the career concept is an important addition to the broader sustainability debate and has set the stage for several recent research streams. The three indicators of sustainable careers are happiness, health (physical and psychological) and productivity. The first two reflect the employee perspective, the third the employer perspective (Van der Heijden, 2005). This makes it a balanced concept.
Three approaches to conceptualize sustainable careers (De Vos et al., 2020; Van der Heijden et al., 2020):
- Individual approach: the individual is the central career actor.
- Systemic approach: careers evolve in contexts and with various stakeholders.
- Dynamic approach: a process perspective, looking at changes between and within persons.
Three dimensions for analysing sustainable careers:
- Person: creating agency and meaning, e.g., through career competencies and adaptability.
- Context: understanding the role of various actors in different layers of context (work group, occupation, organization, institution, nation, private life).
- Time: careers as cyclical self-regulatory processes with dynamic learning (changes and events over time).
Indicators: happy (e.g., engagement, satisfaction, subjective career success), healthy (e.g., workability, well-being, low stress, physical health) and productive (e.g., performance, OCB, employability). The overlap of the three is a sustainable career, reached through a dynamic person-career fit.
The person (agency, meaning) is embedded in a context (work group, occupation, nation, organization, institution, private life), with arrows of productivity and adaptability between them, and moves through time (changes, events; drawn as a wave). Through person-career fit this leads to the three indicators: happy, healthy and productive.
4. Theories for understanding sustainable careers
| Theory | Core principles | Application to careers |
|---|---|---|
| Conservation of Resources (COR) theory (Hobfoll, 1989, 2001) | (1) Primacy of resource loss: losing resources weighs heavier than gaining them; (2) resource generation: people invest resources to gain new ones (gain spirals) | Careers are sustainable when people can protect and build resources (skills, health, networks); losses can trigger loss spirals |
| Self-Determination Theory (SDT) (Deci and Vansteenkiste, 2004; Ryan and Deci, 2000) | Fulfilling the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness leads to intrinsic motivation and well-being | Careers are sustainable when work satisfies these needs (explained in Daniel Pink's 'Drive') |
| Lifespan theories: SOC (Baltes et al., 1999), SST (Carstensen, 1996), LSTC (Heckhausen et al., 2010) | Goals change over the lifespan; strategies for (1) growth, (2) maintenance and (3) regulation of loss | Older workers shift from growth to maintenance and loss regulation; HR should adapt |
SOC stands for Selection, Optimization and Compensation (select goals, optimize resources to reach them, compensate for losses). SST is Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (as time horizons shorten, people prioritize emotionally meaningful goals). LSTC is the Life-Span Theory of Control (people use primary control to change the environment and secondary control to adapt themselves).
A career shock is a disruptive, extraordinary event, partly outside the person's control, that triggers deliberate thinking about one's career (e.g., a reorganization, a promotion, illness, a pandemic). People deal with shocks differently (person), shocks occur in different situations (context) and at different moments (time): dynamic interactions. Shocks can affect happiness, health and productivity; they can cause resource gain or loss (COR), hinder the fulfilment of autonomy, competence and relatedness (SDT), and have different impacts over time (lifespan theories).
5. Current research topics (Van der Heijden et al., 2020)
- How dynamic are sustainable careers across life and career stages? What are between-person and within-person differences?
- Which new theoretical frameworks help to understand the dynamic process of sustainable careers?
- To what degree is career sustainability agentic versus contextually determined (e.g., the impact of family, colleagues, supervisor)?
- Which contextual factors are boundary conditions across life and career stages?
- Differences among occupational groups, countries and cultures?
- Is career sustainability malleable? Can interventions enhance it, and do they work differently for different categories of workers?
- Which methodological approaches and designs are suitable?
- How dynamic is career sustainability in the short term versus the long term?
6. Employability as a core element of sustainable careers
One's ability to realize job opportunities within and between employers over time (Fugate et al., 2021, p. 1).
Employability is much more complex than having a job: it concerns a dynamic interplay between employees (fulfilling the job), employers (competitive advantage) and the economy or society (full employment) over time. Research is therefore conducted across several employability disciplines (Fugate et al., 2021, p. 267): labour economics, education, vocational counselling, careers, human resource management, and work and organizational psychology.
An adaptation of the HR architecture framework of Lepak and Snell (1999, 2002; see Chapter 7). It furthers our understanding of the interdependency between employees and employers and the nature of exchanges between them (e.g., which employee groups receive which employability investments). It can guide future employability research and lays foundations for evidence-based practices for all stakeholders.
7. Ageing in the workplace and career sustainability
Age is more than calendar age. Sterns and Doverspike (1989) distinguish five conceptualizations:
| Type of age | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Calendar (chronological) age | Age in years since birth |
| Lifespan age | Age in terms of life stage and changes in behaviour over the life course (e.g., family situation) |
| Functional or performance-based age | Age based on a person's health, abilities and performance (you can be 60 and function like a 45-year-old) |
| Organizational age (seniority) | Years of service in the organization or job, career stage |
| Psychosocial (subjective) age | How old people feel and how others perceive them (including age stereotypes) |
These distinctions matter for HR because age stereotypes are often based on calendar age while performance depends more on functional age. The message 'older workers are the future' (an ageing workforce with labour shortages) calls for HR that keeps workers employable, healthy and motivated throughout their careers.
Key take-aways
- A career is an evolving sequence of work-related experiences over time, not limited to paid work.
- From Super and Holland (stable lifetime employment) via Schein's career anchors to boundaryless, protean, kaleidoscope, customized and post-corporate careers with individual agency.
- Sustainable careers: happiness, health and productivity; dimensions person, context and time.
- COR, SDT and lifespan theories explain sustainable careers; career shocks as example.
- Employability: realizing job opportunities within and between employers over time; SEA framework.
- Five conceptualizations of age (Sterns and Doverspike).
Andere hoofdstukken van Strategic Human Resource Management
- Ch. 1: SHRM in the 21st century
- Ch. 2: SHRM and context (guest lecture)
- Ch. 3: Adding value through people (guest lecture)
- Ch. 4: Human resource metrics and measures
- Ch. 5: Mutual gains?
- Ch. 6: High performance work systems (guest lecture)
- Ch. 7: Selective recruitment and selection
- Ch. 8: Performance management
- Ch. 9: Compensation
- Ch. 11: Talent management
- Ch. 12: Employee participation
- Ch. 13: Human resource roles
- Ch. 14: International HRM