The Changing Landscape Of Careers

The structural changes in the workplace discussed above, has had an effect on individuals and their ‘careers’. Here I am deliberately using the term ‘career’ in the plural, given the renewed interest in the notion that the term career can be applied to other life-areas, not just an individual’s paid work (Barley, 1989).

From the 1950s, when the notion of a managerial career really began, up until the 1980s, individuals had experienced relative stability and predictability in career terms. The dominant view of a career, and to some extent still is, that of:

A succession of related jobs, arranged in a hierarchy of prestige, through which persons move in an ordered predictable sequence. (Wilensky, 1960)

The structure and order associated with this career definition provided individuals, and indeed organisations, with a sense of security.

However, during the 1990s, many organisations re-structured, or de-layered, largely as a way of managing their cost base. As a result, traditional career models, based on Wilensky’s definition, were eroded as organisations began to flatten their structures. In addition to the cost-saving element, organisations saw flatter structures as a way of speeding up the decision-making process and hence providing a more responsive customer-focused service.

As flatter organisational structures do not lend themselves to conventional career opportunities (Holbeche, 1999), employers and employees have found themselves searching for alternative career models. One new career model that has emerged is that of the ‘boundaryless’ career. This is characterised by movement across levels/functions either within a single organisation, or across multiple organisations. The ‘boundaryless career’ is based on an assumption that work will encompass a variety of tasks and

. . . the person, not the organisation, is managing their career. It consists of all the person’s varied experiences in education, training, work in several organisations, changes in the organisational field . . . it is not what happens to the person in any one organisation.
(Mirvis and Hall, 1994: 369).

The ‘boundaryless’ career then opens up the career space, such that an individual’s career can encompass both paid and non-paid work and where the boundaries between these two domains are more fluid.

Other writers define a career as ‘repositories of knowledge’:

I see careers as accumulations of information and knowledge embodied in skills, expertise and relationship networks, acquired through an evolving sequence of work experiences over time
(Bird, 1996:326), where

The contents of a career are located in what is learned from experiences – in the information, knowledge and perspectives that are acquired, or changed, over time as a result of a series of work experiences.
(Bird, 1994: 327)

Another career definition that is gaining interest, particularly given concerns about work–life balance, is that of a career being seen as part of a whole life-system:

. . . where two careers and two sets of personal and family concerns are integrated into one lifestyle.
(Schein, 1996)

We can see this way of thinking about careers creeping into the behaviours of some individuals in terms of the changes they are making in their own lives in order to gain a more satisfactory work–life balance. Despite the increasing availability of part-time and flexible working, employers cannot, or will not, provide the type of flexibility that employees are looking for. This then leads to employees, particularly highly skilled professionals, seeking alternative work options, such as self-employment (Evans, 2001).

It has been argued that the current recruitment and retention difficulties in the NHS, for example, will not be resolved until the NHS adopts a more flexible stance on its flexible work arrangements. It is not surprising therefore that retaining talent, which if we unpack this is really about retaining organisational ‘know how’, has become one of the top strategic issues for organisations.