Abstract
Career choice is an important behavior for people wanting to develop their social life and is a key link to doing so. The matching of career choice with an individual’s real work demands will have a significant impact on the development of individuals, organizations, and society. However, at this stage, there are few studies on this matching situation. From the perspective of the matching of career anchors and job characteristics, this study explored the distribution and different characteristics of employees’ career demands and their career choices through a survey of 407 employees, and further discussed the matching status of these. The results of the study are as follows: (1) Individual career demands (career anchors) presented three attributes: single, multiple, and unclear. Among the single career anchor types, life anchors had the largest proportion, while among multiple career anchor individuals, individuals with both challenge anchors and service anchors accounted for the majority. (2) Individual career demands (career anchors) were significantly different across most demographic variables and organizational/work variables. (3) Deviations between employees’ career demands and their career choices seemed to be a common phenomenon, with the highest degree of fit (62.79%) with the entrepreneurial creativity anchor and the lowest degree of fit (21.28%) with the lifestyle anchor. In addition, in an analysis of three job fit characteristics, the entrepreneurial creativity anchor had a significant preference for managerial characteristics, whereas the challenge anchor had a significant preference for technological characteristics. The degrees of fit of the other anchors were characterized by the frequency of ‘right suboptimal fit’ being larger than that of ‘left suboptimal fit’. In other words, a specific career anchor had a significant preference for job characteristics matched by the right career anchor, with the midpoint of the career anchor octagon model defining the angle of observation. This study provides a reference for human resource management departments and for employees’ recognition and planning of career anchors.
Highlights
Career choice is the selection and determination of the type and direction of one’s employment, which is a key part of an individual’s development
A specific career anchor had a significant preference for job characteristics matched by the right career anchor, with the midpoint of the career anchor octagon model defining the angle of observation
The black square symbols in the figure indicate the distribution of career black square symbols in the figure indicate the distribution of career anchors, anchors, the the pink pink circle symbols symbols indicate indicate the the distribution distribution of of job job characteristics, characteristics, and the values values in in parentheses parentheses circle and the are the standard deviation of each variable
Summary
Career choice is the selection and determination of the type and direction of one’s employment, which is a key part of an individual’s development. The severe employment situation and enormous employment pressure have led many employment groups to engage in the short-sighted employment behavior of “employment before career choices”, resulting in abnormally high turnover, rejection by enterprises and distorted allocation of human resources [3,4] Worse still, this blind employment behavior makes individuals’ career self-perceptions, career talents and job positions diverge to different degrees—which hinders the self-fulfillment of individuals’ careers—and. Ghalavandi (2012) claimed that consistency in these two factors had a significant influence on turnover intention, career success, and organizational commitment [16] These studies have mostly studied the correlation between the variables from a macro perspective, and few scholars have conducted in-depth analyses of the differences in the matching between different anchor types and job characteristics, making it difficult to creatively propose relevant management strategies from a micro perspective
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