Tales of the unexpected: Integrating career shocks in the contemporary careers literature

By Jos Akkermans, S. Seibert, Stefan T. Mol. 2018

282 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Orientation: This article addresses the interplay between individual agency and contextual factors in contemporary career development processes. In light of the prominence of the former in the contemporary scholarly debate, we present a case for a more comprehensive approach by heeding the latter as well. Research purpose: The main aim of this article was to provide a definition and conceptualisation of career shocks, as well as an agenda for future research on this topic. Motivation for the study: Most of the contemporary careers literature has overemphasised the role of individual agency in career development. While certainly important, we argue that we also need to address the role of context – in this case, career shocks – in order to gain a fuller appreciation of career development processes. Main conclusions and implications: We provide a definition of career shocks based on the existing literature related to chance events and turnover. In addition, we provide an overview of attributes of career shocks, potentially valuable theoretical perspectives and key issues for future research. Contribution: This article brings together several existing streams of literature related to career shocks and provides an integrative definition and conceptualisation. We hope that this will ignite future research on an important but often overlooked topic.

Subfields: Education, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5e17f695f1948867341379e973fc971f5948a59e

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In Education

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Safety Research

Citations in the corpus

Flexible employment relationships and careers in times of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020, unknown): “For example, some individuals might experience the COVID-19 pandemic and related measures as positive (e.g., less contact to bullying colleagues), others as negative (e.g., becoming exhausted from role conflicts), and others even as a career shock (Akkermans, Seibert, & Mol, 2018) .”
Pandemics: Implications for research and practice in industrial and organizational psychology (2020, background): “Indeed for many employees, the pandemic crisis will likely act as a career shock -- an unexpected, distinct, and impactful event that triggers a deliberation about potential career transitions (Akkermans et al., 2018; Akkermans et al., 2020; Seibert et al., 2013).”
Building a sustainable start: The role of career competencies, career success, and career shocks in young professionals' employability (2019, background): “The findings also imply that the career competencies – internal employability relationship may be primarily formed by individual agency and be less sensitive to contextual factors in the form of career shocks (cf. Akkermans et al., 2018).”