Career self-management as resource management through action regulation: Theoretical concepts and practice implications for promoting career management skills
Andreas Hirschi
Schläpfer, D., Wilhelm, F., & Hirschi, A. (2023). Career self-management as resource management through action regulation: Theoretical concepts and practice implications for promoting career management skills. In A. Chant, J. Katsarov, J. Pouyaud, & L. Sovet, (Eds.), Developing Career Management Skills. NICE Foundation.
Abstract
Career management skills are important in today’s labor market, which is characterized by increased volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. This chapter aims to provide a better understanding of core career management skills by presenting a framework which sees career self-management as an active process of resource management. Based on this perspective, career self-management consists of building, maintaining, and applying knowledge and skills, psychological (motivational/ attitudinal), and contextual resources through various career self-management behaviors. We moreover suggest how career self-management skills can be enhanced throughout the lifespan by presenting career self-management as an action-regulation process. This process consists of four phases in terms of (1) goal setting and development, (2) mapping the environment for goal-relevant resources and barriers, (3) planning and execution of behaviors, and (4) monitoring and feedback processing. Based on this conceptualization of career self-management, we discuss how practitioners can assist clients in this process across different action regulation phases of career self-management.
Keywords: career resources, action regulation, career self-management, career self-management skills