Career Success: Employability and the Quality of Work Experiences

 

2019 – In this chapter of the‘International Handbook of Career Guidance’, Annelies van Vianen, Irene de Pater and Paul Preenen argue that the changing labour market and unpredictability of careers necessitate employees to adopt non-traditional norms of career success and assess their career in terms of employability. They propose that employees could promote their employability specifically through engagement in challenging work experiences. High quality jobs provide employees with these experiences, which stimulate learning and adaptability, affect employees’ interests, work attitudes and competency perceptions and increase their organizational power and promotability. Whether employees encounter challenge in their job may depend on their own initiatives.

Research has shown that intrinsically motivated individuals who are mastery-oriented and who are self-efficacious and proactive are more likely to involve in challenging tasks than their extrinsically motivated, performance oriented, low efficacious and passive counterparts.

However the challenging nature of jobs also depends on factors in the work environment such as the task-allocating behaviours of colleagues and supervisors.

The authors conclude that supervisors in particular could promote the challenging experiences, employability and career success of employees by inducing a learning orientation in employees, delegating tasks and monitoring the division of tasks among team members. In addition organizations could foster the making of developmental i-deals with employees and design jobs that are both challenging and attainable.

Reference
‘Career Succes: Employability and the Quality of Work Experiences’; Annelies E.M. van Vianen, Irene E. de Pater, Paul T.Y. Preenen. In: ‘International Handbook of Career Guidance’. J.A. Athanasou; H.N. Perera (Eds.) Springer Nature, Switserland AG, 2019 pp 241 – 262.

  

Themes: Employability, Talent development
Sector: na
Source: Article