Career Management for Life

Jeffrey H. Greenhaus, Gerard A. Callanan, Veronica M. Godshalk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351795685
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Career Management for Life provides students and employees with an integrative approach to managing their careers on an ongoing basis to achieve a satisfying balance between their work and their family responsibilities, community involvement, and personal interests. The career management model guides individuals through the different phases of their career from figuring out what their first job should be right to navigating the road to retirement.

Expert authors Greenhaus, Callanan, and Godshalk bring their wealth of research experience to the book and demonstrate the individual and organizational sides of career management, allowing an appreciation of both. This material is well balanced by a set of practical tools, including self-assessments, case studies, and recommended interviews. The new edition also includes:

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• An emphasis on attaining work-life balance, a topic that is of growing concern to workers at all stages of their careers.

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• An updated focus on today's career contexts and stages.

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• Material on technology and social media, now integrated throughout the book, to reflect the growing importance of these tools in career management and development.

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• A chapter on international careers, helping individuals face a globalized world.

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• Greater emphasis on alternative career paths, reflecting the newest trends and helping individuals understand all the different career options available to them.

This rich and engaging book will help individuals understand themselves better, which in turn allows them to understand what they really want out of their career. Those taking (or offering) classes in career management or career development will come to rely on this book for years to follow.

Part 1
The Career Management Process for Life

Theory and Application

1 Introduction to the Study of Careers

We begin Chapter 1 by recognizing a fundamental quality about career management: Career decisions have their roots not only in past experiences but also in a vision of the future. Encounters with the world can teach people about themselves—what they enjoy doing, what they are good at, and what really matters in work, at home, and in life. In most cases, career decisions are based on the belief that the future in a particular occupation, job, or organization can provide experiences, opportunities, and rewards that are meaningful and satisfying. But careers can be highly unpredictable—especially in today’s world. It is often difficult and sometimes impossible to foresee the roadblocks and detours that can arise as we progress through the many facets of our lives. How well we cope with the twists and turns in our career is what distinguishes effective from ineffective career management.

Career Management for Life has two major aims. First, it is intended to help the reader understand the principles of effective career management and to provide opportunities to develop and practice skills in career management. In this regard, we underscore the importance of career management for life, which actually has dual meanings as we elaborate throughout the book. It means that individuals should manage their career with an eye toward other parts of their life; that is, with an understanding of the impact of their career on their family, community, and personal interests, as well as the effects of these other parts of life on their career. It also means that individuals should manage their career on an ongoing basis throughout their entire life, not just when selecting an initial career field or a job, because people change, the world changes, and jobs change. Second, this book is designed to help managers and future managers respond constructively to their subordinates’ career needs, and to assist human resource specialists develop effective career management systems within their organizations.

A major premise of Career Management for Life is that individuals can exert considerable—although not total—control over their careers. Effective career management requires not only keen insight into oneself and the world of work but also sound decision-making skills that can be developed and improved. As we will discuss in Chapter 4, career management is essentially a problem-solving process in which information is gathered, insight is acquired, goals are set, and strategies are developed to attain those goals. If practiced properly, it can lead to a career that is sustainable over the course of one’s work life, wherein the person can, hopefully, achieve economic security, stay true to important values, adapt to evolving interests, maintain a high level of motivation for work, and attain personal and family well-being.¹

The study of careers is a popular area of interest and inquiry. There are a number of career planning and other self-help books on the market, and the Internet provides many avenues for self-discovery and also serves to facilitate career exploration and networking opportunities. In addition, there are a number of career planning activities provided by corporations, libraries, social or professional organizations, and adult education programs. Research on careers also has a prominent place in the fields of human resource management and organizational behavior. The Academy of Management, a highly prestigious professional organization for management scholars,² has a division devoted to the study of careers. The American Management Association, an organization dedicated to professional development, has hundreds of links to career planning and decision-making resources.³ In addition, professional journals have published a wide range of articles on career-related issues for more than a century.⁴ The primary reason for this popular interest lies in the belief that the concept of career, like no other, can help one to understand the fundamental relationship between people and work, a relationship that has intrigued scholars, mystified organizations, and frustrated people in all sorts of occupations. Consider the following situations:

• An engineer, 20 years out of college, has recently been laid off in a corporate downsizing move. She is beginning to question her competence and drive to succeed.
• A young physician realizes that he chose a career in medicine to please his parents and dreads spending the next 40 years pursuing someone else’s dream.
• A regional sales manager in a small city with many recreational opportunities refuses a promotion to corporate headquarters in a large urbanized city. He enjoys the outdoor life, and his wife is committed to her successful career. He wonders about his future in the company.
• A 35-year-old financial analyst whose employer has just been acquired by an international conglomerate watches nervously as her colleagues are laid-off one after another. Will she be next?
• A recent college graduate has been unable to find employment in his chosen field and has taken on two part-time jobs. He has no idea about what career options to pursue.
• A harried mother in a dual-earner relationship is frustrated in her career because she receives little support from her husband, children, or company.
• A 39-year-old manager feels unfulfilled by a stalled career with no promotions in sight and little job security.

All of these situations require the individual to actively manage his or her career. They provide an opportunity for the person to make an effective career decision or, by default, to allow someone else to make the decision. This book provides a framework for individuals to manage their career more effectively and for organizations to develop policies and practices to help their employees with the task of career management.

Before we provide a more formal definition of a career, we set the stage by describing changes in the world of work and in the broader environment that have occurred or evolved over the past few decades. After all, it is in this new reality—amid a great deal of uncertainty and turbulence—that our careers will unfold and our efforts to manage our work and nonwork lives will take place.

The Changing Landscape of Work and Careers

During the first two decades of the 21st century, a host of environmental factors have dramatically transformed employment relationships and upended longstanding approaches to career management for workers throughout the world. These changes—economic, global, political, technological, and cultural—have profound effects on the world of work. Accompanying these changes is a level of uncertainty that can play havoc with people’s careers and lives. Intense competition in all industries has been fueled by increased international business activity and an uncertain world economy. This fierce competition has produced numerous mergers and acquisitions, internal reorganizations, a restructuring of jobs, and the pursuit of outsourcing as a means to contain costs. In addition, the push to a globalized and integrated business world, rapid advancements in technology, an increasingly diverse workforce, and greater work–life demands all make career management a more tenuous activity.

Changes in the Nature of Work, Employment Relationships, and Psychological Contracts

Perhaps the most significant change in social structures that has occurred over the past quarter-century is the rapid decline in job security felt by workers in the United States and around the industrialized world. In this contemporary work environment, a consistently high level of job insecurity and job loss has become the “new normal.”⁵ The desire of modern organizations to remain flexible as a way to enhance competitiveness through increased cost-cutting and flexibility has produced changes in the psychological contract between employers and employees.⁶ When applied in the context of an employment relationship, a psychological contract is an implicit, unwritten understanding that specifies the contributions an employee is expected to make to the organization and the rewards the employee believes the organization will provide in exchange for his or her contributions.⁷

Up until the 1980s, a traditional or “relational” contract was prevalent whereby the employee received job security in exchange for satisfactory performance and loyalty to the organization.⁸ A relational contract is normally longer-term and involves a high degree of commitment to the relationship on the part of the employee and support of the well-being and employment interests of the employee on the part of the employer.⁹ A transactional contract is usually shorter-term and involves performance-based pay, lower levels of commitment by both parties, and an allowance for easy exit from the implicit agreement.¹⁰ Instead of exchanging performance and loyalty for job security, employees are expected to be flexible in accepting new work assignments and be willing to develop new skills in response to the organization’s needs. In return, the organization does not offer promises of future employment but rather “employability” (with the current employer or some other organization) by providing opportunities for continued professional growth and development. As we will discuss in Chapter 2, this shift in the psychological contract from relational to transactional— from employment to employability—has major implications for employees’ careers.

The movement toward transactional psychological contracts can have negative effects on a number of employee work outcomes. Statistics collected by the U.S. government and independent research point to the presence of job insecurity and job loss over the past three decades. These statistics include incidents of mass job loss, the numbers of jobs individuals hold in a work career, the degrees of unemployment and underemployment, the level of long-term unemployment, and the low degree of employment participation.¹¹

Further, changes in employment patterns and the near death of the relational psychological contract have ushered in new terminology reflective of the temporary and uncertain nature of jobs and careers. These new terms include gig employment, precarious work, independent contract work, tempo...