Career capital: Building our mobility within an evolving world of work (original) (raw)

Building Career Capital: Helping Workers to Enhance Career Mobility in Uncertain Times

Journal for Perspectives of Economic Political and Social Integration, 2019

There is evidence that organisational career role holders are changing roles more frequently. Despite this, career theories such as the career capital lens have so far neglected this role transition context. By adopting the lens of career capital theory specifi cally, this paper explores what aspects of career capital role holders need to facilitate their own voluntary, sideward or upward role transitions. Drawing upon an interpretivist approach and using event-based narrative interviews, this study explores the experiences of 36 business leaders who have undertaken a recent role transition within a large UK construction business. By applying this novel career capital lens, the paper empirically characterises those aspects of career capital important to internal role transitions and compares it to existing mainstream career capital theory. The study is original in that career capital has not been applied before in this increasingly important transition context. Surprisingly, whilst the study demonstrates that career capital eases transitions, it also recognises a 'dark side'-career capital aspects that hinder internal movement.

The New Career Contract: Developing the Whole Person at Midlife and Beyond

Journal of Vocational Behavior, 1995

This is an examination of the current status and future potential of older workers in organizational settings. This analysis will necessarily require a reexamination of traditional models of career stages, particularly in relation to issues of aging in the career context. The paper starts with an examination of the ''career contract,'' the set of mutual expectations between employer and employee and on the ways that contract has changed over the last decade. Our summary view of the new contract is that it reflects a move from an organizationally based career to a protean or self-based career. This change has particularly strong implications, positive and negative, for older workers, and these are explored in depth. We argue that the contemporary high-speed work environment demands two key competencies (which we call ''meta-skills,'' since they are skills for learning how to learn): identity development and heightened adaptability. The development of these meta-skills occurs through a process of midcareer ''routine-busting.'' In our view, this suggests a new view of career stages, in which the focus is on many cycles of learning stages (continuous learning), rather than a single lifelong career stage cycle. The paper concludes with the implication of these new career concepts for the development of older workers, questioning the currently popular model of retraining and calling instead for continuous learning as a means of providing lifelong development for workers of all ages. ᭧ 1995 Academic Press, Inc.

Building career mobility: A critical exploration of career capital

Journal of the National Institute for Career Education and Counselling

Articles are accepted on the condition that authors assign copyright or licence the publication rights in their articles to the National Institute for Career Education and Counselling (NICEC). An important goal of NICEC is to encourage freedom of expression. Individual viewpoints expressed in the journal do not represent NICEC as a whole.

Career pandemonium: Realigning organizations and individuals

Academy of Management Perspectives, 1996

Executive Overview Widespread internal changes in organizations are wreaking havoc on traditional careers. Many people are experiencing major difficulties in their attempts to adapt to the uncertainties of career life. Observing these difficulties, writers on careers have begun to advise individuals to take personal control over their careers by becoming more versatile in their skills, accepting of change, and active in shaping their life at work. Increasingly, organizations are seen as freed from the responsibility of managing careers in their efforts to remain flexible and ready to shift with environmental changes. However, both individuals and organizations have needs for stability and for change. Organizations are better advised to adopt a pluralistic approach to career management that embraces different definitions of career success. In so doing, they will be better able to support the diverse needs of their employees and, simultaneously, enable the organization to reward and maintain diverse competencies in their workforces. Change requires change. Organizations today are making abundant changes internally to cope with a highly turbulent external environment. With frequent reorganizing, downsizing, rightsizing, delayering, flattening the pyramid, teaming and outsourcing taking place, careers and career opportunities are in pandemonium resulting from the progressive destabilization of relationships between people and organizations.'

Ready for the change: strengthening adaptive responses to a looming career transition

2018

Today’s world of work requires workers to adapt their careers to ever-changing demands and circumstances. To adapt successfully, they have to be well prepared, see the need, and know the tools for managing their own careers - a possible challenge at all career stages. According to career construction theory, adaptivity, career adaptability and adaptive responses are crucial to prepare for and successfully deal with career transitions. This dissertation provides new insights and tools for scholars and practitioners who aim to help workers manage their own careers, prepare for transitions, and adapt successfully. A correlational study addressing the relationships between age, adaptivity and adaptive responses shows how some people naturally possess the demographic factors or psychological characteristics that make it easier for them to adapt, while others struggle to show the necessary responses. Therefore, effective interventions that can help workers find their own path in the world...

Careers for the new millennium

Career Development International, 1998

Dr Bruce Lloyd, Principal Lecturer in Strategy at South Bank University, in discussion with Cathy Bereznicki, (now former) Chief Executive of Institute of Careers Guidance, about the challenges facing both the careers guidance industry in particular and its clients in general. These new challenges include the growing importance of lifetime learning, the impact of globalisation in many areas, more flexible working, changing expectations, increasing attention to the whole area of values and a greater emphasis on personal development. All these factors are likely to radically alter what we mean by a career in the years and decades ahead. This will have a far reaching effect on the nature and form of the support industies, such as those provided by the Institute of Careers Guidance.