Карьерные стратегии как факторы субъективного карьерного успеха: на примере выпускников бизнес-школы

Indubitably, career is an important aspect of one’s life, as it usually defines social status, social circle and lifestyle. Career is also a significant marker of one’s identity, and identity, for its part, impacts self-perception, motivation, interests, competences etc. Being an ultimate result of career development, career success is important as well and it has been a focal research topic in management and applied psychology since the 1970s (Spurk, Hirschi & Dries, 2019; Ng, Eby, Sorensen, & Feldman, 2005).
Empirical research on career success has been primarily focused on career success determinants and best practices for its achievement. Historically background factors, such as socio-economic origin, gender, marital status, the human capital factors, which comprises such attributes as education, skills and experience, and the organizational factors, including organizational size and internal promotional practices, were considered to be the key determinants of career success.
At present, the attention shifts to the different factors, especially given the changes in the landscape of work and careers. These changes are reflected in the development of new concepts and approaches. For instance, a substantial number of recent studies are devoted to the protean career concept. While this concept was introduced in 1970s, now it is given much more attention to it. Nowadays, in response to the volatile employment conditions and ambiguous career paths, careers have become increasingly directed by the individual and affected by intrinsic values rather than extrinsic motivations, which is reflected in protean career concept. (Cortellazzo et al., 2020). It not only suggests that career choices are personal and underlie the search for self-fulfillment, but it implies also that person’s internal values provide the guidance and measure of success for the individual’s career. Another theory, boundaryless career concept, implies that employees’ careers are becoming more “boundaryless” and less dependent on traditional organizational career management. “Boundarylessness”, while offering great opportunities for individuals to build a career based on their own preferences, requires from the individuals to engage in proactive behaviors and develop certain competences (Guan et al., 2019). Current studies on career success also examine the behavioral approach, which assumes that individuals are the ones who control their own career advancement and can therefore enact appropriate career plans and tactics that contribute to career success (Ballout, 2007). Advocates of the behavioral approach (e.g. Aryee et al., 1996; Gould and Penley, 1984; Greenhaus and Callanan, 1994) suggest that the employees should learn to play an active rather than passive role in the management of their own careers by engaging in career strategy behaviors that improve career prospects, rather than relying entirely on organizational career systems that are unlikely to meet their individual needs or expectations (Nabi, 1999).
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Mentioned perspectives reflect the fact that the focus of contemporary research is on the individuals and their role in managing their own careers. The concept of career strategies goes in line with this, implying that individuals pursue certain career strategies to achieve career success (Penley & Gould, 1974).
Traditionally career success was measured with objective measures such as salary or promotions. However use of only objective measures of success led researches to a question: why are there so many objectively successful but still vastly unfulfilled people? (Forbes, 2020). For the reason that the individuals may not be intrinsically satisfied with their careers, even if they have positive extrinsic career outcomes, some researches consider subjective measures of career success to be more meaningful than objective ones (Kim and Beehr, 2017). It goes in line with number of concepts, e.g. The Well-being Five concept, which considers career well-being as one of five essential elements of overall individual’s well-being (Rath & Harter, 2010). The idea of importance of subjective career success is being confirmed in practice. For example, Eith, Harald & Claudia demonstrated that more and more individuals make decisions based on subjective criteria, instead of salary or promotions. What’s more, studies report that the correlation between objective career success and subjective career success is typically small to moderate, ranging from 0,22 to 0,3 (Ng et al., 2005).
A number of theories identify university studies period as the first or the second stage of career development, and this is particularly relevant nowadays. In addition to managing career more actively, individuals start to do it earlier. Students start to explore certain careers, actively network, work with mentors and pursue other career strategies during studies, as they are concerned about their career and take actions to make themselves marketable and improve chances of successful employment. Now, in coronavirus reality, students are even more concerned about their career paths (CTV News, 2020). While students engage in certain career-related activities, the impact of these activities is not well investigated in the literature. There is a gap in understanding which of these activities are common to the students and whether they can be positively related to career success. Therefore it is worth investigating if career-related activities of students can be associated with higher levels of subjective career success.
Research tasks are:
1. To define students’ career-related activities as career strategies;
2. To define subjective career success and identify its measures;
3. To investigate what career strategies are inherent to students;
4. To examine which career strategies of students are related to the subjective career success;
5. To discuss implications of the research findings.
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The results of this study will be valuable for students, employers and business schools. The findings will help students in choosing reasonable activities in which they engaged during the study. The employers can use the findings of the study to design selection process and internships in order to help potential employees to experience higher level of subjective career success and therefore have higher productivity (Pachulicz, Schmitt and Kuljanin, 2008), experience stronger organizational commitment (Rasdi, Ismail and Garavan, 2011), enhance the willingness of older workers to remain in the organization (Armstrong-Stassen & Ursel, 2009). Studies show that career satisfaction and subjective career success are ones of the strongest predictors of long-term positive company performance (Dai & Song, 2016). Business schools can use these findings in order to prioritize the extracurricular activities, choose the proper events, improve the curriculum etc.
The research is explanatory in type, as the main goal is to identify the relationship between career strategies of students and their subjective career success. First, career and career development concepts are discussed. Then the study proceeds with career success concept, which defines what career success is, what the determinants of career success exists in general. After general ideas about career development and career success are derived, the research moves on to study a specific subject which is the career strategies. The academic literature dedicated to the career strategies and their role in career success achievement is reviewed and analyzed. Then the research proceeds with the discussion of career strategies of students, discusses the results of existing studies and identifies gaps.