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Virtually all contemporary scientific papers studying careers emphasize its changing nature. Indeed, careers have been changing during recent decades, for example becoming more complex and unpredictable. Furthermore, hallmarks of the new career – such as individual agency – are clearly increasing in importance in today’s labor market. This led the authors to ask the question of whether these changes are actually visible in the topics that career scholars research. In other words, the purpose of this paper is to discover the trending topics in careers.

To achieve this goal, the authors analyzed all published papers from four core career journals (i.e. Career Development International, Career Development Quarterly, Journal of Career Assessment, and Journal of Career Development) between 2012 and 2016. Using a five-step procedure involving three researchers, the authors formulated the 16 most trending topics.

Some traditional career topics are still quite popular today (e.g. career success as the #1 trending topic), whereas other topics have emerged during recent years (e.g. employability as the #3 trending topic). In addition, some topics that are closely related to career research – such as unemployment and job search – surprisingly turned out not to be a trending topic.

In reviewing all published papers in CDI, CDQ, JCA, and JCD between 2012 and 2016, the authors provide a unique overview of currently trending topics, and the authors compare this to the overall discourse on careers. In addition, the authors formulate key questions for future research.

The field of careers studies is complex and fragmented. The aim of this paper is to detail why it is important to study careers, what we study and how we study key issues in this evolving field.

Key theories, concepts and models are briefly reviewed to lay the groundwork for offering an agenda for future research.

The authors recommend ten key directions for future research and offer specific questions for further study.

This paper contributes to the development of the theoretical underpinning of career studies.

The authors hope that the proposed agenda for future research will help advance the field and encourage more research on understudied, but important, topics.

This paper presents a comprehensive view of research on contemporary careers.

Few studies examine the career success of women in the Arab Middle East. With that in mind, the purpose of this paper is to explore the conceptualizations of the career success of women managers in Lebanon. Drawing on the individual, behavioral, and structural approaches, this study also investigates the women’s approaches to career success. Capitalizing on the institutional theory (IT), the current investigation accounts for the complexity of the local context by illustrating how a diverse set of socio-cultural values and norms, institutional constraints, and individual agency impact the overall experience of career success among Arab women.

This study is exploratory in nature and draws on a qualitative approach. In-depth, face-to-face, open-ended interviews were conducted with women managers across the managerial hierarchy in a wide range of industries, sectors, and organizations.

The findings suggest that the Lebanese women managers’ career success was not conceptualized exclusively using the objective or the subjective measures. Rather, it was conceptualized on a continuum between these measures, thus challenging the rigid objective/subjective dichotomy in the context of Lebanon. The results also suggest that the career success of these women managers is better predicted and explained by the individual and behavioral approaches than by the traditional, structural approach. This empirical work sheds light on the gendered working conditions that women experience and how they capitalize on their individual agency to survive the hegemonic masculinity embedded in their workplaces, along with the inequalities that it promotes.

This study is the first to explore the conceptualizations and the determinants of the career success of women managers in Lebanon. However, the originality of this paper is not only limited to its contribution to the limited research on the careers of Arab women; it also extends to its usage of various approaches to predict career success as well as to adapt IT as a theoretical framework for capturing the myriad of factors that impact women’s careers and success. The originality of this study also lies in advancing the theoretical concept of hegemonic masculinity into studies looking at Arab women’s career experiences by shedding some light on how the reproduction of gender, gendered working practices, and agency impact their career success.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it attempts to examine how employees’ career planning (CP) interacts with the quality of leader-member exchange (LMX) to explain subjective career success. Second, the authors investigate how the pattern of such interactions differs between male and female employees.

To increase the generalizability, the study tested hypotheses in two studies whose data were collected in different national settings. Study 1 was designed to analyze 144 Korean employees and Study 2 investigated 140 Japanese employees. Both groups of employees worked for privately owned firms.

The authors found a three-way interaction effect between gender, CP, and LMX quality in predicting subjective career success. As hypothesized, the positive relationship between quality of LMX and subjective career success was stronger for males with high CP, whereas for females such a stronger relationship was found for women with low CP.

This study contributes to the literature in two ways. First, it extends career research by considering the interactive effects of individual and interpersonal factors on employees’ subjective career success. Second, it combines the research streams of social exchange theory (LMX), career theory (the boundaryless career), and gender theory (agentic and communal personality traits). This suggests that the ideas of the three theories could serve together as a useful framework for explaining gender differences in subjective career success through setting career goals and building relationships with supervisors.

The findings have important practical implications for managers and leaders, who generally seek to motivate their employees toward career achievement.

This study is one of the first to provide a new perspective for understanding the process by which men and women perceive their subjective career success differently with regard to social exchange relations with their supervisors and CP.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of grit (consistency of interest and perseverance of effort) on entrepreneurial career success (career satisfaction, perceived career achievement and perceived financial attainment) through the role of resilience.

The study was cross-sectional, and the data were collected using questionnaires from 111 entrepreneurs in Nigeria who have been in business for over five years and were selected using purposive sampling technique. The study used Smart-PLS to assess the measurement and structural model.

The perseverance of effort was related to all the aspects of career success as well as resilience. But consistency of interest was positively related to only perceived financial attainment. It also predicted resilience. Resilience was also related to all the facets of career success. All three mediation hypotheses were supported.

The study delivered fascinating understandings into the structures of grit. The Western conceptualisation of grit may not be valid in a collectivist society where consistency is not that very much considered.

The study helps to further validate grit in the entrepreneurship field; the construct is a facilitator of entrepreneurial action and an indispensable source of energy that can revitalise the entrepreneur along the arduous road to success.

The two components of grit can have a dissimilar influence on different outcomes – as prior investigations, although recognising that the two components are conceptually dissimilar, have rarely studied them so empirically.

The study uses social cognitive career theory (SCCT) to explore the driving and restraining factors that students consider in selecting auditing as a career.

Considering the aim of this study, a qualitative research was preferred with the objective of gathering in-depth and enriched empirical data; hence, semi-structured interviews were conducted with seventy-five fourth-year undergraduate accounting students of six top-ranked universities in Ghana that offer accounting programmes.

The findings of the current study unearth the constructs of the SCCT that students' decision to consider a career in audit is driven by outcome expectations (high earnings/monetary incentives and social prestige associated with the job), as well as self-efficacy belief (possession of ethical values). Further, the study finds that self-efficacy beliefs (job stress and accounting stereotype) were the factors restraining students from considering auditing as a career. The results finally show that the students who would choose auditing as a career in future are in one way or the other, preparing for the achievement of their goals.

The SCCT framework utilized focuses on the three main constructs: self-efficacy, outcome expectations and goals. There are a number of related factors that may influence students' career choice decisions. These may include personal characteristics and contextual influences; a change of the theoretical framework may help discover other important personal and contextual factors that this current study could not unearth.

The study indicates, on the contrary, that students have negative perceptions about auditing as a career option; they consider the career as stressful, tedious and monotonous. These misconceptions make it less likely for a student to pursue auditing as a career. Educators can aid students in their decision to pursue a study in accounting and become auditors by displaying and reinforcing the positive outcomes that come with the position of an auditor.

The findings of this study add to the existing literature by delving deeper into the self-selection factors that influence a student's desire to become an auditor. Furthermore, the current research is exceptional in that it applies the SCCT to the aim of becoming an auditor. Although other research studies have looked into factors that may influence a student's decision to pursue a profession as an accountant, these studies have mostly been quantitative, limiting the students' ability to explain why those factors encourage or dissuade them.

The low number of women in the information technology (IT) field is a concern. The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors behind the exclusion of girls from the IT field.

The present work includes a narrative literature review and an exploratory interview study with ten girls and six study guidance counsellors (GCs) from Finnish senior high schools. Using the nexus analysis as a theoretical lens, the authors examined the exclusion of girls from IT.

Earlier literature directed attention to the cultural norms, assumptions and stereotypes still prevalent in society and the lack of role models and positive media as factors contributing to girls excluding themselves from the IT field. In this research study’s data, the authors not only found evidence of the unintentional exclusion of girls from IT by others but also by the girls themselves. Findings of this research study illustrate the various discourses, actors and their interactions, their background and history-related factors affecting girls' career choices. The novelty of this study is in approaching high school as a site of exclusion, where problematic discourses, interactions and histories come together, reproducing exclusion of girls from the IT field.

The authors contribute with a literature review of the research study on gender and IT and the inclusion/exclusion dynamics around IT. Using the nexus analysis, the authors identify the exclusion dynamics in this complex social issue. Several decades of research have shown that the inclusion of women remains low in IT disciplines. In this study, high schools are viewed as sites of exclusion, engendering a prevalent lack of information and education on the field. The authors offer novel insights into the role of curriculum, GCs and online information excluding girls from the IT field.

The dynamic career scenario and the significant change from traditionally placing careers in employers’ hands to self-managing one’s careers have sparked profound scholarly interest in career growth. This paper aims to analyze quadricentennial literature on career growth published during the years 1995 through 2020. In this paper, through bibliometric and integrative reviews, the authors address the two critical questions, “what do we know?” and “where should we go?” While the bibliometric review examines the evolution and trends, the integrative review examines the dynamics of conceptual frameworks, primary research foci, research context and quality in research designs and methods.

The study adopted preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses guidelines to identify the papers for this review. The data set comprised 102 papers and 60 papers for bibliometric and integrative review, respectively. “CiteSpace” is used for the bibliometric analysis and the template designed by the authors is used for the integrative review.

The results present conceptual clarification for career growth and its related constructs. The bibliometric analysis findings highlight the extensive research on career growth followed by organizational career growth and career growth opportunities. The findings also show that seven of the top 10 productive authors are from China. This study also identifies theoretical, conceptual and methodological opportunities and provides recommendations intended to further research engagements across the different aspects of career growth.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to introduce bibliometric analysis into career growth literature. This research adopts an integrative review approach and offers insights into career growth literature.

The study aims to discover influences on the career intentions of millennials in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Qualitative data about career intentions were collected from a sample group (#50) of students at an international university in the UAE. Participant's responses were recorded in five groups, composed of undergraduates, males and females, expatriates and citizens. Transcripts were formed of these data, which were thematically analysed to identify influences on career intentions.

Four emergent themes were identified of influences on career intentions: (1) influenced by societal obligations, (2) influenced by a traditional approach to career plans; (3) influenced by own aspirations; (4) influenced by country considerations. Findings recognised career intentions for this sample group resulted from cultural orientation and millennial's characteristics.

The study was limited by the one country/one university context and a direction is to replicate for an expanded sample group and/or to extend this research scope to other countries.

These findings have implications for university career advising, and the recruitment and retention of millennials in the UAE by international companies.

This is an original study in its exploration of influences on millennial's career intentions in the UAE. Research value lies in the addition of academic knowledge about those millennials' future career intentions.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the structural relationships between protean career attitude, career resilience, proactive career behavior and external employability.

This study sampled 212 training apprentice employees who participated in training programs using a proportional stratified sampling in South Korea. The study tested the research model using structural equation modeling.

This study revealed that protean career attitude influenced external employability through career resilience and proactive career behavior. Career resilience fully mediated the relationship between protean career attitude and external employability and partially mediated protean career attitude and proactive career behavior. Proactive career behavior also mediated the relationship between protean career attitude and external employability.

This study has a limitation by relying on cross-sectional data. In terms of theoretical implications, this study can add new knowledge to the protean career research by demonstrating that the protean career attitude influences perceived external employability through career resilience and proactive career behavior for the sample of young training apprentice employees.

This study uncovers the dynamic processes between protean career attitude and perceived external employability. Moreover, this study’s sample is significant because training apprentice employees are mostly young in their 20s and 30s with less than three years of working experience and working in small and medium-sized enterprises in South Korea.