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Economic stressors such as job insecurity, job loss, unemployment, and underemployment cause severe difficulties for the workers affected, their families, organizations, and societies overall. Consequently, most past research has taken a thoroughly negative perspective on economic stress, addressing its diverse negative consequences and the ways that people try to cope with them. And even when following the advice provided by the scientific literature, people affected by economic stress will usually end up being off worse than they were before the onset of the stressor.

The current chapter pays credit to this perspective yet also tries to counterbalance it with an alternative one. While acknowledging the vast amount of literature outlining the negative consequences of economic stress on peoples’ well-being and careers, some literature also points at opportunities for a more positive perspective. More specifically, we argue that affected people can use a wide repertoire of behaviors for handling their current situation. Of particular promise in this regard is the concept of career adaptability, generally defined as the ability to change to fit into new career-related circumstances. Indeed, studies show that under certain conditions, career adaptability can facilitate people's search for not just any job but for a qualitatively better job, thus breaking through the spiral of losses usually associated with economic stress.

For the purpose of this argument, we link career adaptability to the concept of proactive coping, analyzing how and under which conditions career adaptability may present a contextualized form of proactive coping. We then address known personal and situational antecedents of career adaptability and show how career adaptability may be fostered and trained among different types of job seekers. We end this chapter with a discussion of open questions as well as directions for future research.

With the ageing global population the demand for nursing jobs and the requirements for complex care provision are increasing. In consequence, nursing professionals need to be ready to adapt, obtain variety of skills and engage in career self-management. The purpose of this paper is to investigate individual, micro-level, resources and behaviors that can facilitate matching processes between nursing professionals and their jobs.

A survey-based study was conducted among 314 part-time and full-time nursing professionals in Hungary.

Consistent with the career construction theory, this study offers evidence on career adaptability as a self-regulatory resource that might stimulate nurses’ adaptation outcomes. Specifically, it demonstrates positive relationships between adaptive readiness (proactive personality and conscientiousness), career adaptability, adapting behaviors (career planning and proactive skill development) and adaptation outcomes (employability and in-role performance).

The cross-sectional design limits causal inference. Relatively small sample of full-time professionals for whom supervisory-ratings were obtained yields the need of further replication.

Stimulating development of nurses’ career adaptability, career planning, and proactive skill development can contribute to sustainable career management. It can facilitate the alignment of nurses to performance requirements of their current jobs, preventing individual person-job mismatch.

Zooming into the context of nursing professionals in Hungary, the study elucidates the understudied link between adaptivity and adapting responses and answers the call for more research that employs other-ratings of adaptation outcomes. It demonstrates the value of career adaptability resources for nurses’ employability and in-role performance.

In the current labour market, the competence to adapt is becoming significantly relevant for career development and career success. The construct of career adaptability, i.e. the capability to adapt to changing career-related circumstances and predict advancement in career development, seems to provide a fruitful scientific base for successful career intervention. The purpose of the study is exploratory, with the aim of providing new findings about the key predictors of this meta-competence that are relevant for career development.

Through a web-based survey, a convenience sample of 230 working participants completed an online questionnaire, including socio-demographic characteristics (age, gender, education), professional status (role seniority, sector of employment, professional role), professional development-related features (training, new professional assignments, financial incentives) and psychological factors (work self-efficacy, search for work self-efficacy and job satisfaction). Four-step hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted to understand which of these factors account for the most career adaptability variance.

Results highlight that work self-efficacy, search for work self-efficacy and education play a significant role in predicting career adaptability. Surprisingly, professional development-related features and professional status do not seem to have a relevant influence.

Training and career-development professionals can improve their understanding of which career-related skills and attitudes can increase one’s capability to cope with sudden changes and instability of the current labour market.

This study supports previous research, addressing the importance of career adaptability in times of dramatic change. It also provides some insight into the factors that could predict it.

This chapter applies three of the most prominent theories in vocational and career psychology to further illuminate the turnover process. Prevailing theories about attrition have rarely integrated explanatory constructs from vocational research, though career (and job) choices clearly have implications for employee affect and loyalty to a chosen job in a career field. Despite remarkable inroads by new perspectives for explaining turnover, career, and vocational formulations can nonetheless enrich these – and conventional – formulations about why incumbents stay or leave their jobs. To illustrate, vocational theories can help clarify why certain shocks (critical events precipitating thoughts of leaving) drive attrition and what embeds incumbents. In particular, this chapter reviews Super's life-span career theory, Holland's career model, and social cognitive career theory and describes how they can fill in theoretical gaps in the understanding of organizational withdrawal.

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of mastery goal orientation, support for career development, career decision-making self-efficacy and engineering interest in career adaptability for engineering students.

Data were collected from 307 Korean engineering students from two universities. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze data and examine the relationships among the variables.

The results indicated that the level of mastery of goal orientation and support for career development significantly affected career decision-making self-efficacy. Engineering students’ career decision-making self-efficacy also positively influenced their engineering interests and career adaptability. Finally, the students’ engineering interest positively affected their career adaptability.

This study demonstrated that important factors for career planning and development need to be successively considered during the career choice process by linking it to career decision-making self-efficacy, engineering interest and career adaptability (career choice action), in consecutive order.

The purpose of this paper is two‐fold: first, the degree to which career adaptability, career optimism, and career knowledge predict career decisiveness in China, Germany, and the US is to be examined; second, the effect of the five personality traits on the determinants of career decisiveness, on career decisiveness, and on the relation between career decisiveness and its determinants in the three countries is to be investigated.

A survey was conducted using a structured questionnaire. The sample consists of 555 business students from three countries: China (196), Germany (210), and the USA (149). A two‐stage OLS regression analysis was applied for assessing the relation between career decisiveness, its determinants, and the personality traits.

The results show that personality traits have direct and moderating effects on career decisiveness and its antecedents. In addition, the influence of personality and the antecedents of career decisiveness differ in the three countries examined.

The conclusions of this study may be subject to several limitations that suggest further possibilities for empirical research, e.g. the study does not examine the influence of cultural traits on career decisiveness, its determinants, and their relation.

The identified cross‐country differences lead to the need for diverse career counseling for students with different personalities in different countries.

So far research on students' career decisiveness has focused only on national samples. The explorative paper examines the influence of personality traits on business students' career decisiveness in three countries.

Military officials who become accustomed to the distinct culture of the military face a variety of challenges when attempting to transition into the civilian workforce as veterans. These hardships even pertain to short- and mid-term veterans (SMVs) who leave the military at early career stages to pursue alternative career options. In this study, the authors explored the career construction decisions made by South Korean SMVs who left their military careers and successfully transitioned into the civilian workforce.

The authors used a phenomenology approach and conducted a semi-structured interview with 19 SMVs to unpack their career transition experiences.

The authors identified the motivational factors that encourage SMVs to develop their four career adaptabilities and illustrated the necessity for such qualities pre- and post-transition. Furthermore, the authors characterized each individual experience by the theoretical constructs of career adaptability and highlighted the contextual characteristics that prompted the emergence of career adaptability.

This study contributes to the understanding of career mobility at early career stages and how career adaptability is developed and manifested in the context of transitioning from the military to civilian society.

In a socioeconomic context that is undergoing continuous change, career adaptability emerges as a central construct for understanding the employability of graduates. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to analyze intra-individual differences in career adaptability among graduates between the end of graduation (time 1) and integration into the labor market 18 months later (time 2); and second, to analyze the effect of career adaptability on graduates’ employment status 18 months after completing graduation.

A sample of 183 graduates in four different study fields (Economics, Engineering, Social Sciences and Humanities and Law) completed the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale at two different points in time: when they graduated and 18 months after graduation. To assess intra-individual differences over time and the effect of career adaptability on graduates’ employment status, a repeated measures design was used.

The obtained results confirmed a positive association of the four dimensions of career adaptability, with higher scores for the group of employed graduates, in the two measurement times. No statistical differences emerged within personal variables.

This study evidences the relation of career adaptability and employability and demonstrates that it is possible to identify those students who are more vulnerable in terms of career adaptability resources before university-to-work transition and, on this basis, to outline specific interventions to promote their employability.

By adopting a design with two repeated measures of career adaptability, this study offers new insights about the specific role of adaptability in a university-to-work transition period.

The purpose of this paper is to discover the antecedents of intrapreneurship. Based on career construction theory and prior personality studies, this study examined the mediating effects of career adaptability on the relation between personality traits and intrapreneurship.

A cross-sectional survey was conducted using employees from four Korean companies. The hypothesized research model was tested with 473 data using structural equation modeling. The bootstrap procedure and the phantom model approach were also employed to thoroughly examine the indirect effects of personality traits on intrapreneurship via career adaptability.

The results demonstrated that career adaptability mediated the overall relation between personality traits and intrapreneurship. Career adaptability completely mediated the relation between intrapreneurship and both openness and conscientiousness from the Big Five personality dimensions. Regarding extraversion, the mediating effects of career adaptability were not supported by the results, but the direct effects were found to be significant.

These findings offer new insights into the intrapreneurial talents required of employees in organizations. The application of the identified direct or indirect impact of personality traits through career adaptability may help human resource managers to select and foster potential intrapreneurs and facilitate career coaches in understanding employees’ assets and obstacles in developing intrapreneurial competencies.

This is the first empirical study to explore the mechanism between personality traits and intrapreneurship by examining the mediating role of career adaptability in the workplace and thereby this study contributes to bridging the gap of different research domains between intrapreneurship and career adaptability.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the contribution of personal factors towards career adaptability among fresh graduates who had been employed for less than two years. This cohort is considered as entry-level employees in organisations. Several dimensions of personal factors focussed in this study were self-esteem, conscientiousness, spiritual intelligence and social support.

This study used a quantitative approach using a cross-sectional survey. This study sample comprised fresh graduate employees (n = 423) from four Malaysian public universities.

The regression model fitted the data; the personal factors significantly predicted fresh graduates’ career adaptability, F (4,418) = 31.982, p < 0.001. Conscientiousness showed the highest contribution compared to other variables, with social support being the lowest.

Owing to challenges faced by fresh graduates as entry-level employees, continuous career adaptation in the working environment is crucial for achieving satisfaction and success in life. All stakeholders, especially in higher education institutions, play an important role in inculcating the requisite personal traits in undergraduates to enhance their career adaptability upon joining the job market.

This study was conducted with fresh graduates as entry-level employees in Malaysia. It is hoped that the findings of this study would provide a better understanding of the impact of personal factors on career adaptability of fresh graduates in Malaysia so that the stakeholders involved could act accordingly to help fresh graduates enter the job market with the confidence to adapt to changes at the workplace.