Content area
Full Text
Widespread internal changes in organizations are wreaking havoc on traditional careers. Many people are experiencing major difficulties in their attempts to adapt to the uncertainties of career life. Observing these difficulties, writers on careers have begun to advise individuals to take personal control over their careers by becoming more versatile in their skills, accepting of change, and
active in shaping their life at work. Increasingly, organizations are seen as freed from the responsibility of managing careers in their efforts to remain flexible and ready to shift with environmental changes. However, both individuals and organizations have needs for stability and for change. Organizations are better advised to adopt a pluralistic approach to career
management that embraces different definitions of career success. In so doing, they will be better able to support the diverse needs of their employees and, simultaneously, enable the organization to reward and maintain diverse competencies in their workforces.
Change requires change. Organizations today are making abundant changes internally to cope with a highly turbulent external environment. With frequent reorganizing, downsizing, rightsizing, delayering, flattening the pyramid, teaming and outsourcing taking place, careers and career opportunities are in pandemonium resulting from the progressive destabilization of relationships between people and organizations.1
Several leading business journals recently declared that the job itself, as a vehicle for packaging work, is on the endangered species list. They write that the constant reorganizations and downsizings have fundamentally ruptured the informal employment covenant between employer and employee. In a delayered organization, getting ahead in one's career may no longer mean ascending a corporate ladder.
Various remedies are being offered to deal with the resulting havoc in careers. Typically, the recommendations call for a shift to a new, more change-oriented definition of careers and philosophy of career management. Responsibility for career development must now lie with the individual, not the organization; individuals should prepare themselves for a career involving frequent changes in employers and in the very nature of the work that they perform. People need to be more flexible and versatile in their skills and knowledge, and must be willing to go anywhere, at any time, and at a moment's notice, to do anything. One must not cling to a job, organization, or type of work. Those who...