Career Mobility: A Choice or Necessity?
What is triggering the industrial, occupational, and geographical mobility of today's workers? Some believe it is a response to downsizing and restructuring. Others believe it reflects a pursuit for job advancement and a better quality of life. This Digest examines the factors triggering workers' career mobility and suggests ways workers can use career mobility to capitalize on the dynamics of a changing workplace.
Factors Contributing to Career Mobility
Job mobility in the U.S. work force has become the standard employment pattern in today's workplace. Between 1991 and 1996, the median job tenure for men 25-64 years of age fell by an average of approximately 19 percent, with older workers
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It is just that the skills they have and/or their job functions no longer fit their organizations; they are outdated. Workers whose skills or motivations no longer fit the organization are being eliminated. "Over the past two decades, Fortune 500 companies have laid off millions of workers to re-engineer organizational functions" (Borchard 1995, p. 9). Knowing these facts, many workers who want to retain a competitive position in the work force are moving to acquire new skills that will enable them to fulfill new roles. They are taking risks (some imposed and some elected) to tackle the unfamiliar and develop the skills they need to assume new and challenging positions in the workplace.
Pursuit of a Good Career Match
Young workers typically demonstrate their quest for a good career match by frequent job moves. According to Feller (1996), "as many as 50% to 60% of all new hires leave their jobs within the first seven months" (p. 95). Some job churning may be due to limited knowledge of job requirements and unrealistic job expectations. For more experienced workers, the job hop may reflect an attempt to step up the career ladder. A person may have one or two short-term jobs, but when that employment pattern is extensive, it can have a negative influence on an employer's decision to hire. Therefore, job hopping in search of a satisfying career should not become a way of life. Because it is costly to hire and train new workers, some employers believe
The arguments to explain career theories have been criticized for their lack of ability to explain career development among racial and ethnic minorities (Brown, 2002; Fassinger, 2001; Fitzgerald & Betz 1994), and among individuals with limited education and/or inferior socioeconomic status (SES) (Fassinger, 2001; Vespia, Stone & Kanz, 2001). In the meantime, the labor force in the United States of America (USA) has shifted into a more diverse and divergent force consisting of more female, immigrants, and ethnic and racial minority workers (Lerman & Schmidt 2011), which results in the need to develop models that are
workers will find other more personally beneficial opportunities. Cited as one of the reasons for
Another growing concern is job placement and according to Rimmerman et al. (1995) individuals with a
In today’s society, the work industry is comprised of numerous generations from baby boomers to millennia’s. Due to reasons ranging from increased cost of living to political policies, Americans are being forced to work longer in order to obtain the social security benefits they’ve contributed to during their careers. Each generation has certain generational influences such as war times and civil rights for the baby boomers and social media and the technology boom for the millennia’s. One constant that has not changed, however, is that the average American has to work for a living, and with the evolution of the US economy, they are having to work longer and are retiring later.
This case is about hiring and employee retention processes centered on new college graduates that, instead of offering ideal and permanent career pathways to these recent graduates and new employees, turn out to become for them a platform or a launch-pad from which they hunt for their dream careers after a couple of years. Despite the costs associated with and the high turnover trend caused by it, this practice continued over time and became increasingly unsustainable, with a rise in job insecurity, and subsequently a reduction in job satisfaction and organizational commitment that come with it. Initiatives from human resource management and the many changes in strategy attempted by senior management
Another reason is that advances in technology influence the way jobs are performed. For example, Tesco now have self-service machines so fewer employees will be recruited to work on the tills and instead they are able to stock the shelves and increase sales. Also, another reason is that there may be staff being promoted internally which means somebody already working for a company gets a promotion to a higher job. Therefore, their former role will need to be filled by recruiting someone new.
Medical assistants there have been significant changes in the management of healthcare services, both in the United States and across Europe. As a result, more middle management positions have become
There comes a time in life where individuals have to leave school to join the world of work whereby they will work their way up to the top. This is where career development comes into place. Career development is defined as progress through various stages in a career (Schreuder & Coetzee,2011). These are stages one goes through in order to mature in a career and for development to even exist, one has to start with making a career choice then developing it .A career choice can be defined as the relation between people’s personality types and their different occupational environment in which they work in.
In our recommendation to Microsoft, it is our belief that the focus for future developments in the HR sector should be around the fostering of job security in order to improve retention rates. In order to meet these goals, it is proposed that Microsoft implement policies that attempt to foster a sense of mobility, hospitality, and perspective growth while still acknowledging the uniqueness of the modern landscape with respect to the individuality and career goals of each employee. To begin Microsoft need to ensure that there is not only vertical mobility but also lateral mobility options available within
Aging! We all do it every day, but have you ever thought how it is going to affect the rest of your life or more importantly your career? Aging isn’t something that we get to choose if we participate in, however working is, and aging may affect that choice. Right now, I want you to think about the age of sixty-five. What words pop into your head when you think of someone sixty-five? I’d imagine some of the words you thought of were retired, old, fragile, slow, as well as many others. Those words right there all help to explain the many concerns that one’s employer may have when hiring someone that is of the older population. When we think of the older population in the work force we don’t necessarily think of positive things, instead we think of things. When we think of this population in the workforce we generally think of lower production rates and higher costs. These can create issues among the older population, as employers must consider all the possibilities when hiring someone. We know that more people in the older population are continuing to try to continue their careers, but why? How hard is it for them to continue? What changes have made it easier? How are the younger and middle aged populations perceiving them in the work place? This are only some of the many question surrounding the increase of aged workers.
retirement provisions to leave their jobs before they would otherwise have chosen to retire. Others who remain on the job claim that they confront hostile work environments or are demoted to less remunerative positions, with their age being the big factor.
For example, human resources have to adjust to this external challenge by applying different job requirements and polices. Also by offering different positions to older employees that require less physical activates but where they can share their rich working experience with younger generations.
Breakings through the chains of corporate slavery is in full affect. In other words, nobody wants to work for a heartless corporation that does not value their staff. Individuals are educated and ready to make a career change if necessary. The overwhelming feeling of being imprisoned by a job is dreadful. Even the most loyal captive will seek an opportunity to break free from a dreadful organization. The sensation of being confined within an organization with no room to grow or expand is a daunting feeling. When individuals are treated as if they do not matter, it raises the question; why stay here? If employers are naïve enough to think that there are no other options for hard working people, they are wrong. The information being
Many theories of career development are derived from theories of personality (Sharf 1997). They attempt to illuminate the interrelationship of individual personality and behavior with work and careers. However, some prevailing career development theories were based solely on research on white males from middle- and upper-middle-class backgrounds, so their applicability to women, people of color, and other socioeconomic groups has been called into question. In addition, the focus on individual psychological or personality characteristics does not take into account the wider environmental context in which people make career decisions, thus failing to recognize the constraints faced by some
Career progression is the aim for most workers, but career development is not something most of us think regularly. But without proper understanding of what we want from our career and how we can achieve our goals quicker, we can quickly end up dissatisfied with our jobs.