Search results

Drawing on sustainable career theory as a framework, our study aims to explore how Asian international students studying in a UK-based University Business School view their employability, career aspirations, and career resources.

A total of 128 participants provided 602 voice-recorded reflective diary insights over six weeks while studying a mandatory employability module in a postgraduate Master’s programme at a UK-based Russell Group University Business School. The reflective diary insights addressed employability (weeks 1 and 3), aspirations (weeks 2 and 5), and career resources (weeks 4 and 6). Thematic analysis was conducted before theme and code prevalence were counted to compare changes between the two time points for each topic.

Employability includes skills, experiences and qualifications (theme 1), challenges (theme 2), and career ownership (theme 3). Aspirations include intrinsic motivators (theme 4), extrinsic motivators (theme 5), and person-organisation fit (theme 6). Career resources include people (theme 7), knowledge (theme 8) and signalling (theme 9). Time influences the interplay of person and contextual dimensions across the two timespans with different effects between and within themes.

Theoretically, our study advances the empirical validation of sustainable career theory, as well as integrating graduate employability and career development streams into higher education research. Methodologically, it underscores the underutilised potential of diary studies in the field. Practically, it offers insights for lecturers, university career advisors, and employers to holistically address the employability, aspirations, and career resources of international students.

Drawing on a theoretical framework of sustainable career ecosystem theory, our paper aims to consider how domestic and international postgraduates can enhance their employability through participation in a landscape of practice.

The study employed an exploratory, longitudinal case study design to capture students' lived experiences on an 18-month Master of Professional Practice course at a higher education institution in New Zealand. The data collection procedure involved field note observations (months 1–4), a focus group (month 13) and narrative frames (months 16–18). The sample was domestic students from New Zealand (n = 2) and international students from Asia (n = 5).

One’s participation in multiple communities of practice represents their landscape of practice and a commitment to lifewide learning. Through participation in various communities of practice, domestic and international students can enhance their employability in three ways: (1) boundary encounters to develop social capital, (2) transcending contexts to enhance cultural capital, and (3) acknowledging the development of psychological capital and career agency.

Our work offers one of the earliest empirical validations of sustainable career ecosystem theory. Expressly, communities of practice represent various contexts whereby employability capital is developed over time. Additionally, the postgraduate students themselves are portrayed as interconnected and interdependent actors, presenting a novel framing of such dependencies at the micro-level of the ecosystem. The practical implications come from informing universities of the value of a landscape of practice to enhance the employability of domestic and international students in preparation for sustainable careers and to promote the sustainability of the career ecosystem.

This study aims to explore the impact of engaging in serious leisure (SL) on the well-being (WB) and self-perceived employability (PE) of university students while also considering the role of career adaptability (CA) as a mediator.

A total of 905 domestic undergraduate students from China completed an online survey.

The findings reveal that participation in SL positively influences WB and PE. Additionally, the results indicate that CA mediates the SL-WB relationship but not the SL-PE relationship.

The theoretical contribution of this research comes from advancing our understanding of sustainable career theory through empirical testing of SL, PE, and CA on WB outcomes within a higher education setting. The practical implications of this study involve providing universities with strategies to support domestic Chinese undergraduate students in enhancing their WB and PE through active engagement in SL pursuits and the development of CA. Moreover, our findings serve as a foundation for future research investigating whether insights gained from domestic Chinese undergraduate students can provide solutions on a global scale to address the persistent challenges of improving student WB and PE.

This study aims to understand how employability capitals’ dynamics foster self-perceived employability (SPE) among students and graduates, which is still being empirically explored. Building upon the Employability Capital Growth Model and the Social Cognitive Career Theory’s career self-management model, we aimed to understand how different capitals associate by testing a serial mediation model connecting career identity (reflecting career identity capital) and SPE through the serial mediation of cultural capital and job interview self-efficacy (ISE) (an element of psychological capital).

We adopted a two-wave design involving 227 Italian University students and graduates. We recruited participants through multi-channel communication. The hypothesised relationships were analysed employing the structural equation modelling approach with the SPSS AMOS statistical package.

The results indicated that career identity, cultural capital, ISE and SPE are meaningfully related. In particular, in line with our expectations, we observed that career identity predicts cultural capital, which is positively associated with ISE which, ultimately, impacts SPE.

Our work adds to existing research by advancing the understanding of employability capitals, explaining how they interact and influence SPE, which is crucial for a sustainable transition into the workforce. At a practical level, our findings call upon, and guide, efforts from various stakeholders in the graduate career ecosystem (i.e. universities and their partners) to offer students and graduates meaningful experiences to form and use their employability capitals.

The purpose of this paper is to examine career engagement and perceived employability during the school-to-work transition. We studied within-person changes in career engagement and perceived employability in the transition from higher education to the labor market. We investigated their dynamic reciprocal relationship to unravel whether career engagement or perceived employability is the leading indicator in the relationship in view of providing adequate support for students during the school-to-work transition.

We conducted latent change score (LCS) analyses on a three-wave sample of 701 graduates in Flanders (Belgium). We collected data in July (right before graduation), November and May. LCS is a novel method allowing to simultaneously test change and reciprocal relationships.

Our findings demonstrated how both career engagement and perceived employability changed (within-person) non-linearly during the school-to-work transition. As for their relationship, we found that perceived employability is the driving force in the relationship. Perceived employability fueled subsequent positive changes in career engagement, whereas career engagement did not lead to subsequent changes in perceived employability.

Our study connects the career development and the graduate employability literature, and examines the school-to-work transition from preparation for the labor market to ten months after graduation. We also make an important methodological contribution, demonstrating the added value of LCS for studying employability in higher education. Our findings provide insights in how higher education institutions may support students in the school-to-work transition.

Drawing on a framework of sustainable career theory, this paper aims to understand the interplay of agentic and contextual factors for digital micro-entrepreneurs to lead sustainable careers.

Eighteen YouTube content creators in India participated in semi-structured interviews, offering coverage of digital content creators across acting, cosmetics, finance, fitness, food, law, modelling, music, teaching, travel, and video games.

The findings showed three agentic and three contextual themes associated with the career sustainability of a digital micro-entrepreneur. Additionally, four paradoxes were identified, capturing the interplay between the agentic and contextual themes.

The career of a digital micro-entrepreneur is a dichotomy of promising hope, stardom, and flexibility while concealing challenges like precarity, hate comments, and financial instability. Knowing this can help individuals make better-informed career decisions.

The study advances sustainable career theory by capturing insights from digital micro-entrepreneurs in India to understand the interplay of agentic and contextual factors that create a series of paradoxes for such individuals to navigate over time.

The purpose of this article is to explore career development programs for the sales force including benefits, implementation and managerial implications.

Career development programs are viewed through a conceptual model consisting of assessment, direction and development.

This paper provides a comprehensive list of the benefits of a career development program for sales forces.

The conceptual model can serve as a checklist for sales managers to evaluate, add to or modify their programs. The conceptual model also provides a framework for tying together many disparate areas of career development that have been handled separately or ignored in the sales management literature.

This paper provides a comprehensive conceptual model of career development that has not been present in the sales management literature. This should be useful to sales managers in evaluating their own career development efforts. The framework should also be useful to sales management scholars who teach and do research in this area.

Our study aimed to understand how a negative career shock (CS), caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, a global crisis, impacted employees’ career success and life satisfaction in China.

Employees (n = 737) from industries adversely impacted by COVID-19-related restrictions (e.g. (a) catering, hotel and tourism; (b) construction and real estate; (c) finance; (d) technology; (e) logistics and (f) manufacturing) responded to an online survey on a negative CS, subjective career success, objective career success (OCS), life satisfaction and protean career orientation (PCO).

A negative CS was negatively associated with OCS and life satisfaction. Subjective and OCS were positively associated with life satisfaction. PCO moderated the association between a negative CS and OCS.

The practical contribution comes from informing strategies for individuals and employers in China to enact when facing future chance events on a national or global scale.

The theoretical contribution of our research comes from advancing the conservation of resources theory by considering the impact of a negative CS as an independent variable and PCO as a moderator on career success and life satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between personality traits and both job and career satisfaction among salespeople. The authors also wished to examine the extent to which biologically based personality traits provided insights into job and career satisfaction.

The authors used latent profile analysis (LPA) to assess a sample of 299 salespeople along the dimensions of emotional stability, extraversion, work drive, teamwork orientation, customer service orientation, optimism and both job and career satisfaction.

The findings revealed two distinct groups, and these groups were markedly different along the biologically based traits of optimism, extraversion, emotional stability and along both job and career satisfaction. The differences across these groups were especially pronounced for career satisfaction.

Our findings suggest that firms might wish to devote limited resources to improving the skill sets of salespeople with the “right” disposition, rather than attempting to train candidates to cope with the emotional and visceral aspects of sales.

The relationship between biologically based traits and job/career satisfaction has not yet been examined. Moreover, the use of LPA provides interesting insights that regression or structural equation modeling-based approaches would not.

The concept of culture has been an important subject of managerial interest over the past decade, yet little has been written about how culture can be managed within the industrial salesforce. Describes the key components of a salesforce culture and explains the characteristics of a well‐managed salesforce culture. Finally, develops suggestions for managing the industrial salesforce culture around three strategic factors: planning, implementation and control. Concludes by providing some guidelines for further research in this important area.