Abstract
Current perspectives on career success have yet to show whether and how subjective career success evaluations may change over time and across career phases. By adopting a retrospective life-span approach to careers, our qualitative inquiry into the career experiences of 63 professionals contributes to the temporal understanding of subjective career success by exploring patterns in how subjective career success perceptions and priorities may change over time. The temporal development of subjective career success was explored among early-career, mid-career, and late-career workers by piecing together retrospective evaluations of career success perceptions. Our findings point to common patterns in career success perceptions across the lifespan. Specifically, we found five shift components of career success perceptions during people’s careers: (1) quitting striving for financial success and recognition; (2) an increased focus on personal development across the career; (3) a stronger emphasis on work–life balance across the career; (4) a shift toward being of service to others; and (5) no change in subjective career success components across the career. These patterns reflect ways in which workers engage in motivational self-regulation and the corresponding career goal-setting across the lifespan. The theoretical implications are discussed.
Highlights
We explore how perceptions of and priorities in subjective career success aspects may change over the course of a career and how these perceptions relate to motivational self-regulation
When we look at financial security the respondents talk about working on financial stability and becoming independent and self-reliant as key reasons as to why financial security is a central aspect of their career success
When we look at personal development as an SCS aspect over the course of the career, the respondents report either that personal development was always a central aspect of their career success, or the respondents talk about how they shifted from financial security toward personal development in their SCS perception in either the early- or the mid-career
Summary
A career can be defined as “the unfolding sequence of a person’s work experiences over time” [1] Many career theories, such as the career development theory [2], life stage theory [3], and the kaleidoscope career [4] explicitly address the role of time, in the form of career phases and stages, in explaining how individual careers evolve. This focus on temporal shifts is much less prominent in recent studies, which have focused on the outcome of a career: career success [5]. With the emergence of more volatile environments, flexible careers and increased interorganizational mobility, the research focus has shifted to SCS indicators, most notably in terms of career satisfaction [6,12]
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