The Sustainability of Reskilling Projects Based on Employees’ Readiness for a Career Shift: Pursuing Sustainable Careers by Transitioning into IT Professions

Abstract

Today’s organizations are highly responsive to external changes, which they also demand from their employees. All employees need competencies to respond to Industry 4.0, the green business economy, and post-COVID-19 work circumstances and to manage sustainable careers. One way of doing so is to take active part in reskilling projects and be ready for a career shift, which we believe can be foreseen in people’s devotion to sustainable careers and can ensure the sustainability of the whole reskilling project. With the presumption that the concept of sustainable careers can be captured in terms of the concept of readiness for a career shift, this study aims to explore the potential of the scale of readiness for career shifts to predict participants’ success in reskilling projects (in the context of IT professions). The research was conducted on 336 candidates who applied for Java and PHP programming positions and had no previous knowledge or experience in the field. The results show that the scale of readiness for career shifts has acceptable metric characteristics, and canonical discriminant analysis confirmed that the overall score can be used to predict outcomes in the reskilling project, while predictions based on single indicators were rather ambiguous. Therefore, the scale can be used as a tool in the process of selecting reskilling candidates (at least in professional transitions in the domain of IT), but further research on the topic might shed more light on the concept.