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In the context of the “year‐2000” problem, focuses on the risk involved in real time clocks and their interactions with associated embedded processors and logic arrays, dedicated electronic control and monitoring logic incorporated into larger systems. These are essential to the operation of a vast portfolio of infrastructures, from medical equipment, to buildings (phone, security, heating, plumbing and lighting), to transportation, to financial networks, to just‐in‐time delivery systems, and so on. According to a recent study, the firmware (permanently loaded instructions) that enables these systems to run is date sensitive and not year‐2000‐compliant in less than 1 percent of the 50 billion microprocessors and microcontrollers used in embedded systems installed worldwide by the end of the twentieth century. This small fraction will fail, causing the systems they control to begin failing around 1 January 2000 and for the first few years of the next century. Presents a pessimistic, illustrative scenario, describing the disruption of essential infrastructure from electric power, to food and fuel distribution, to communications, to financial networks.

With changing employment conditions, technological advancement, frequent manpower reduction and global competition, the relevance of the protean and boundaryless career concepts is increasing. With this, the country’s culture plays a pivotal role in career choice. The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate protean and boundaryless career scales for college passing out students and in the Indian context. The protean career scale was measured by self-directed and values-driven dimensions, while the boundaryless career scale was measured by boundaryless mindset and organizational mobility preference.

The first step involved defining construct and determining face validity. The data collected via questionnaire from India’s final year engineering students were subjected to exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis in the second and third steps, respectively. Finally, the nomological validity was tested by establishing the relationship between factors influencing career choice and newly developed protean and boundaryless career.

The result suggested using a two-factor model with a protean career (combining self-directed and values-driven items) and a boundaryless career as a separate construct for college passing out students.

The developed scale has nine items that can be used to conduct surveys at the time of campus hiring by academic scholars, HR managers, and practitioners who are working on the identification, development and management of human talent as a part of any human resource management system.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first approach to developing the protean and boundaryless career scale for college passing out students and in the Indian context which can be replicable for South Asian countries.

Within the current discourse on contemporary careers and the context of international assignments, this paper seeks to conduct a study of a large European MNC, with the aim of theory development on expatriation/repatriation.

A qualitative study, based on semi‐structured interviews in a major financial institution.

Motivation to expatriate falls into two distinct categories – company initiated assignments; and self‐initiated, career orientated and/or self‐development focused. The authors propose a two dimensional model to depict the emergence of a new expatriation path alongside the traditional one – differentiating those who respond to an international assignment call within a clearly framed career development path; and those embarking on international assignment as, primarily, a personal growth opportunity. A distinctive sub‐group of corporate self‐initiated expatriates is identified for the first time.

A qualitative study within one company.

The emergent models could be utilized by HR managers to shape future policies and practices for global assignments.

Providing a new model to explicate the relevance of a protean career attitude in a global boundaryless career environment; outlining of new emergent international career trajectories, in particular corporate self‐initiated careers.

The concept of workforce agility has become increasingly popular in recent years. However, defining it has sparked much discussion and ambiguity. Recognizing this ambiguity, this paper aims to inductively develop a behavioral taxonomy of workforce agility.

The authors interviewed 36 experts in the field of agility and used concept mapping and the critical incident technique to create a behavioral taxonomy.

The authors identified a behavioral taxonomy consisting of ten dimensions: (1) accepting changes, (2) decision making, (3) creating transparency, (4) collaboration, (5) reflection, (6) user centricity, (7) iteration, (8) testing, (9) self-organization, and (10) learning.

The authors’ research contributes to the literature in that it offers an inductively developed behavioral taxonomy of workforce agility with ten dimensions. It further adds to the literature by tying the notion of workforce agility to the performance literature.

The authors’ results suggest that it might be beneficial for companies to take all workforce agility dimensions into account when creating an agile culture, starting agile projects, integrating agility into hiring decisions or evaluating employee performance.

This paper uses an inductive approach to define workforce agility as a set of behavioral dimensions, integrating the scientific as well as the practitioner literature on agility.

The purpose of this paper is to explore individual approaches to career and employability through the career stories of a group of mid‐level to senior managers in career transition. Career patterns are identified and then compared with traditional, boundaryless and protean models of career. The study aims to consider the extent to which individuals in this group had adopted behaviours supportive of future employability as opposed to behaviours more in line with traditional careers.

The research adopted an interpretive and qualitative approach. In‐depth interviews were conducted with people currently going through a career transition program. The interviews were recorded and then transcribed, coded and analysed using NVivo, a qualitative research software tool.

Career patterns appeared to be shifting away from traditional careers and more towards protean and boundaryless models. There was evidence of increased responsibility for career self‐management and of behaviours supportive of ongoing employability. Self‐perceived employability could be linked to degree of job mobility and having a future career orientation.

Despite the small sample size and the subjective nature of self‐reported career histories the study provides insights into the relationship between career patterns and employability. Both organisations and individuals need to work towards developing attitudes and behaviours supportive of employability such as flexibility, adaptability and a future career orientation.

Individual level career management will need to focus more on the development of attitudes and behaviours appropriate to contemporary employment relationships than on the development of formal career plans. At an organizational level support can be provided by encouraging flexibility through activities such as job rotation, short‐term projects and opportunities for both internal and external networking.

The study provides empirical evidence of how careers are being managed within contemporary employment relationships.

This paper aims to move towards clarification of the self‐initiated expatriate/expatriation construct with the aim of extending and deepening theory development in the field.

Drawing on Suddaby's think piece on construct clarity, this paper applies his proposed four elements; definitional clarity, scope conditions, relationships between constructs and coherence, in order to clarify the SIE construct.

The discussion examines the “problem of definition” and its impact on SIE scholarship. The spatial, temporal and value‐laden constraints that must be considered by SIE scholars are expounded, and the links between SIE research and career theory are developed. From this, potential research agendas are proposed.

This is a conceptual piece which, rather than giving precise research data, encourages further thinking in the field.

Although the definitional difficulties of SIEs have been identified in previous literature, this is the first attempt to clarify the boundaries of SIE and its interconnectedness with other related constructs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between protean career attitude (PCA) and proactive work behaviors (PWB) and with the theoretical underpinning of self-determination theory to ascertain if passion for work acts as a mediator for PCA and PWB.

A survey of 255 millennial employees working in diverse industries in India (such as information technology, banking and education) was conducted. Regression analysis was used to measure the direct effects of the hypothesized relationships. Sobel test and bootstrapping analysis were used to measure the indirect effects of the hypothesized relationship.

PCA assists in fostering passion for work. Passion for work is positively related with PWB and fully mediates the relationship between PCA and PWB.

Employers should provide flexibility in work design and autonomy in career decisions. Also, Human resource managers should provide career growth opportunities to retain millennial talent.

This study bridges the knowledge gap between different domains of knowledge including PCA, passion for work and PWB. This study is one of the rare attempts to understand the relationship between PCA and PWB through the lens of passion for work. It also bridges the gap relating to its context. With an increasing number of millennials in workforce in India, an understanding of their career attitudes and outcome behaviors has become a significant concern. The results of the present study underpin career motivation theory, self-determination theory and generational cohort theory.

Changing career patterns and the erosion of job security have led to a growing emphasis on employability as a basis for career and employment success. The written and psychological contracts between employer and employer have become more transactional and less relational, and loyalty is no longer a guarantee of ongoing employment. Individuals are thus expected to take primary responsibility for their own employability rather than relying on the organisation to direct and maintain their careers. The purpose of this paper is to identify and examine the assumptions underpinning the concept of employability and evaluate the extent to which employability has been adopted as a new covenant in the employment relationship.

Through a review of relevant literature the paper discusses current research on careers and employability and examines the available evidence regarding its adoption as a basis for contemporary employment relationships.

The paper finds that the transfer of responsibility for employability from organisation to individual has not been widespread. There is still an expectation that organisations will manage careers through job‐specific training and development. Employability has primarily benefited employees with highly developed or high‐demand skills. Employability is not a guarantee of finding suitable employment.

Employers can assist their employees by clarifying changes to the psychological contract, highlighting the benefits of career self‐management, and providing training and development in generic employability skills.

The paper questions underlying assumptions about employability and explores issues of relevance to human resource managers, policy‐makers, employers and employees.

Contemporary careers research suggests that individuals are more likely to be proactive about their careers when they possess an internal, rather than an external locus of control (LOC). The purpose of this paper is to adopt the view that individuals can be both external and proactive depending on whether or not they possess an incremental implicit theory.

Self-administered surveys were completed by 127 employed individuals in Nigeria. These surveys were used to gather information on individuals’ external LOC, protean and boundaryless career orientations and implicit theory beliefs.

Results indicated partial support for positive relationships between external LOC and contemporary career orientations and that an incremental implicit theory can have a positive moderating effect on the relationship between an external LOC belief in chance and the values-driven protean career orientation.

The study was based on a cross-sectional study in one time period and all information was self-report.

The results suggest that HR managers that operate in global environments should consider the importance of individual implicit theory and on career orientations and take a broader view of the role of internal and external LOC.

The study questions whether predominant perspectives of the relationship between proactive career orientations and internal LOC applies to contexts where external LOC predominate.

This study is unique in the examination of positive relationships between implicit theory, external LOC and contemporary career orientations. Furthermore, the study examines these relationships in an unstable and unpredictable work environment context, Nigeria, where such positive relationships are highly necessary to improve the career self-management of individuals.

Using psychological contract theory as its foundation, the purpose of this paper is to examine the important, but under-explored, relationship between careerism and organizational attitudes among workers in India.

In total, 250 middle-level executives, working in six manufacturing plants of motorbike companies located in Northern India, were surveyed.

As hypothesized, careerism was found to be negatively related to affective commitment, organization satisfaction and perceived organizational performance. Contrary to expectations, however, careerism was positively related to continuance and normative commitment.

The study is based on a cross-sectional survey. Also, because the motorbike industry is male dominated, all the executives surveyed are men.

Despite concerns that employees with more transactional relationships with their employers are no longer loyal to their organizations, this study demonstrates that Indian employees with a higher careerism also have higher levels of normative and continuance organizational commitment.

Prior research has produced conflicting results as to whether employees with more careerist, transactional psychological contracts with their employers have more negative organizational attitudes. This study contributes to research on psychological contract theory and careerism in today’s turbulent career landscape while also answering calls to examine the generalizability of western theories of careers in non-western countries.