Assignment 83

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10: Career Development

Dr. Mirna Safi

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Introduction

The ability to predict careers has decreased, flexibility has increased, and if individuals are willing to follow opportunities as they arise, then it has been argued that greater career success is the outcome.

A number of new career types have been proposed to describe contemporary careers, such as boundaryless, protean, authentic, portfolio and kaleidoscope careers.

One commonality shared by these concepts is that of self-directedness.

What is a career?

The term ‘career’ was initially used to indicate a designation of privilege.

The terms occupation or job were used to describe situations where individuals exchanged their labour or skills for monetary reward.

The term career has significantly broadened to include the entirety of work experiences that a person engages in, rather than focusing solely on employment in one industry or profession.

What is a career?

The evolving sequence of a person’s work experiences over time

(Arthur et. al, 1989).

The distinguishing characteristics of this definition are:

Its emphasis on the ‘evolving sequence’ which recognizes that careers are not stationary, but change over time.

‘Work experiences’ includes paid employment, but also denotes homemaking and other productive efforts that provide important career skills.

‘Over time’ suggests that a career lasts a lifetime

What is a career?

Career development is a lifelong process where individuals look at:

Occupational options available to them, select an option, and continue to make choices from the vast possibilities available to them.

The use of metaphors is very common when talking about careers.

Describing careers as a journey, for example:

Career path

Career ladder

Getting to the top.

New careers may be more accurately described in more open-ended metaphors such as ‘travelling’ rather than ‘journeys’.

What is a career?

Traditional versus contemporary career perspectives

Traditionally, people worked for one or two organizations in their lives and, by working hard, they would gradually take on more responsibility when the organization considered them ready for advancement or promotion.

Wilensky (1961:523) defined a traditional career as “a succession of related jobs arranged in a hierarchy of prestige through which people move in ordered (more or less predictable) sequence”.

The conventional public sector career path where employment is characterised by job security and lifelong employment is an example of this type of career.

Contemporary careers

Current careers tend to be dynamic, less predictable, and boundaryless (Lips-Wiersma and Hall, 2007).

It is the individual who bears primary responsibility for the planning and managing of their own careers.

Career Concepts:

Boundaryless

Protean

Authentic

Kaleidoscope

Off-Ramp Careers.

Boundaryless careers

Widening the perspective of careers to incorporate a range of possible careers both within and across organizations.

A boundaryless career is not determined by the prevailing career system of one employer nor represented by an orderly sequence of hierarchical upwards movement.

Boundaryless careers are not confined to physical changes of employment, the notion also applies to movement across psychological boundaries.

Career development requires the strengthening of self-direction and adaptability within a more transactional employment relationship.

Protean careers

The protean career offers a self-directed approach to career that is driven by the values of the individual (Briscoe and Hall, 2002).

A person pursuing a protean career moves quickly to improvise new ways of working, making the most of the empowerment it provides them.

Acts as a compass in providing direction (Hall, 2002) for an individual.

Understanding who they are and knowing their values, needs, goals and interests.

Protean careers

Hall (2004) identified two competencies that help individuals become more protean. These are adaptability and/or self-awareness.

Self-awareness and understanding are pivotal to the values-driven nature of a protean career, ensuring a secure personal base in which to foster career success and from which to interact with the changing external conditions.

Adaptability involves the capacity to change career and work behaviours in a way that allows the individual to succeed in a number of contexts with the need for externally-driven career development.

Authentic careers

An authentic individual as one who makes career choices that are consistent with the past or with an imagined future about who they would like to become.

The key characteristic is that there is a consistent set of beliefs guiding the career.

An authentic career-oriented individual is one willing to take the initiative and responsibility for their career and able to achieve consistency between past and present, and private and public expressions of themselves (Svejenova, 2005).

Kaleidoscope careers

A kaleidoscope career is created and evolved on the individual’s own terms, defined by their own values, life choices and parameters, rather than by the organisation (Mainiero and Sullivan, 2006).

This particular concept is predominantly female-oriented in focus.

Individuals amend, adjust and modify this kaleidoscope or career pattern, by rotating the various aspects of their lives to arrange roles and relationships in new ways.

Individuals strive for challenging work that facilitates career advancement and increases self-worth.

A need for balance exists with regard to work, relationships and personal concerns.

Off-ramp careers

A predominantly gender-specific career concept has emerged in recent years in response to the “male competitive model” of careers (Hewlett, 2007).

The male competitive model of careers supported a preference for a continuous employment history, which penalised women who needed to take time out of their careers.

The idea of off-ramp careers provide an arc of career flexibility that allows women to “ramp-down” or take time off from their career and subsequently “ramp-up” or re-enter the labour market without losing career traction.

Off-ramp careers

Facilitating ease of access in returning to careers has led to organizations introducing a variety of career flexibility and flexible working arrangements in terms of:

Reduced-hour options

Flexible working times

Job sharing

Telecommuting

Seasonal flexibility.

Off-ramping from a male managerial perspective is concerned with strategic repositioning of his career rather than for family-related concerns.

Portfolio careers

Rather than pursuing a single full-time job, the individual balances a portfolio of different and changing employment opportunities (Handy,1989).

Portfolio-centred career development is based on a very different set of assumptions regarding the nature of careers and of the relationship between the organization and the employee:

The contract output is identified

Matching portfolio of skills needed to complete the contract is specified

Individuals with those skills are located in the HR information system

The contract is offered and then managed.

Graduate careers

In such difficult labour markets, the competition for graduate jobs has intensified (Taylor, 2011).

Consequently, when graduates do find employment, it isn’t always at a skill level or pay rate commensurate with their education.

Rosenberg et al. (2012) highlight that leadership skills, management skills, interpersonal skills, critical thinking skills and a strong work ethic are among the most essential skills for employment.

Initial entry into the labour market is important but the nature of contemporary knowledge work means that the foundations of many careers take years to develop.

Graduate careers

Universities and colleges are now frequently giving employability greater priority at central or strategic level.

Knight and Yorke (2004, p.38) suggest that graduate employability encompasses the combination of four aspects of higher education:

‘Understanding of subject matter’ - mastery of the subject matter of the degree.

‘Skilful practices’ - characterised as procedural knowledge.

‘Efficacy beliefs’ - belief that one can make some impact on situations and events.

‘Metacognition’ - awareness of what one knows and can do, and of how one learns more.

Responsibility for career development

Changes in organizations as a result of globalization and advancements in technology have led to a revised notion of the traditional ‘career contract’, resulting in a decrease in employers’ commitment and willingness to retain individuals.

This lack of job security places significance on individual to take control of their future employability.

Employees are increasingly negotiating individualized work opportunities that fit their career and work–family relationships and expect greater flexibility on the part of their employer.

Responsibility for career development

In discussing responsibility for career development, we must consider the nature of the psychological contract.

Psychological contracts are the individual belief systems held by employees and employers regarding their mutual obligations to and agreements with each other (Rousseau, 1995).

There are two kinds of psychological contract (Rousseau, 1995):

Transactional

Relational.

Career anchor theory

Career progression may no longer be defined narrowly as upward mobility or indeed advancement in the context of one organization.

Each anchor in fact attaches different meaning to ‘progression’ and predicts why employees value the same aspects of their job differently.

For example, take the general management career anchor. This is perhaps the anchor that organizations assume to be held by middle management and prioritizes climbing the organization’s hierarchy.

Career anchor theory

Schein and Van Maanen (2013) argue that individuals with sufficient work experience (approximately 35 years +) can easily identify one dominant career anchor out of the following:

General Management

Functional Expertise

Autonomy

Security & Stability

Sense of Service

Pure Challenge

Creativity

Lifestyle