Human Resource Development, Identity, and Career Development

Abstract

This chapter presents the typology of career development related or impacted dimensions of identity. The chapter builds upon Chapters 1–7 by synthesizing the information about identity, career success, demographics, and life events, into a model that can be used when thinking about and designing career development programs. The model presents the response to each aspect of identity (life events, demographics, and other dimensions), of both human resource management, as well as human resource development, practitioners. This chapter necessarily draws certain aspects of employment law into the discussion, because the response of human resource management to aspects of identity is customarily through a compliance-based lens. Because the intention and focus of the book is to comprehensively examine identity and its various manifestations, the book examines both human resource management and proposes human resource development responses. For example, when an employee has a close relative who is experiencing a serious illness, the employer is bound by the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to, for a qualified employee, provide time off to care for the relative. This is an example of a compliance-based response to an aspect of identity. The chapter highlights the gaps in the literature about human resource development’s response to these different types of (in sometimes, very commonly experienced) types of identity, and it closes those gaps by proposing ways for human resource development practitioners to respond.