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This article presents a cognitive framework to study dynamic/adaptive aspects of a collection of popular fit measures used in organisation research, in an attempt to highlight what there is to be gained.

This paper uses a distributed e-cognition (DEC) framework to examine the current organisational literature of fit measures.

This paper highlights that most measures have a rather narrow focus and do not address dynamic/adaptive aspects in complex social systems (e.g. organisations). To both provide a way to integrate fit measures and cover the cognition gap in this literature, this article highlights the need for a more sophisticated measure.

This paper provides a novel approach to examining organisational fit literature through a distributed (e)-cognitive framework.

This chapter explores the impact of employee mobility on career sustainability, that is, the extent to which a career enables an individual to remain happy, healthy, and productive over the life course. I argue that whether employee mobility strengthens or weakens career sustainability depends on the extent to which the mobility experience increases (sustainable) or diminishes (unsustainable) person-career fit. I suggest that different forms of mobility (e.g., upward versus lateral) may have different effects on fit and subsequent career sustainability. Moreover, it is possible that a mobility experience can enhance fit in some respects but still have a negative effect on the long-term sustainability of a career. Research is necessary to address these and other questions regarding the relationship between employee mobility and career sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a synthesis of the contingent work field and to advocate a sustainable career perspective on contingent work.

Adopting a broader review approach allowed to synthesize the contingent work literature across contingent work types (temporary agency work, gig work and freelance work) and develop a sustainable career perspective on contingent work. The authors searched for empirical, conceptual and review articles published from 2008 to December 2021. In total, the authors included 208 articles.

The authors advocate a sustainable career perspective that allows for organizing and synthesizing the fragmented contingent work literature. Adopting a sustainable career perspective enables to study contingent work from a dynamic perspective transcending one single organization.

The field is suffering from fragmentation and most importantly from an oversight of how contingent work experiences play a role in a persons’ career. This paper addresses this problem by adopting a sustainable career perspective on contingent work.

The purpose of this paper is to explore accountancy students’ pre‐employment decisions as regards pursuing a career after completing an internship. The paper aims to analyse the mediating effect of aspects of students’ training experience in firms as direct/indirect factors which influence their career decisions.

The data were collected from a class after the students had completed internships and analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM). The aim was to establish a model after nesting the second‐order confirmatory analysis of the data. The final stage was to analyse multiple mediating factors, such as the type of company (TOC) and the students’ opinion of the company.

The interns perceived opportunities for promotion in accounting firms as a long‐term advantage over salary and benefits and as a key criterion for pursuing a career in accountancy. The results indicate that person‐job (P‐J) fit affects students’ career choice more than person‐organisation (P‐O) fit, and that students’ negative opinion of the company environment mediates their intention to pursue a career in the firm after graduation.

The sample size of 121 students was limited by the number of student intake per year and the study was conducted based on per intake. This may limit the generalisability of the results.

The internship coordinators should provide sufficient information to students about the expectations of accounting firms before embarking on them and encourage an open feedback loop when they return from training to improve the internship programmes. Accounting firms, in turn, should prepare comprehensive work schedules that balance out routine administrative work with challenging auditing or tax tasks. These would improve the students’ judgement and lead them to better decisions to pursue the career and reduce turnover.

This study highlights the importance of the transitional career decisions of graduating students as regards pursuing a career in accountancy, and therefore adds to the second cycle of early employment among college graduates in the vocational literature. It also confirms the mediating factors which indirectly affect students’ career decisions and therefore how firms can improve these circumstances for future recruitment.

Externalities influence the career trajectories of self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) and their respective career crafting. This study aims to explore the international career crafting of SIEs (encompassing their proactive career reflection and construction), taking the combined external influences of complexity, chance and change into consideration.

The authors employ a qualitative (interpretative) approach, combining career crafting and the chaos theory of careers (CTC) to further understand, from an individual standpoint, the impact of externalities on the career crafting strategies of 24 SIEs who have relocated within the European Union.

The authors show that SIEs' proactively craft their careers to varying degrees and with varying frequency. The CTC – incorporating complexity, chance and change – allows for a more nuanced understanding of SIEs' career crafting.

This paper applies the concept of career crafting to an international context, exploring the impact of externalities on SIEs' careers. In this way, the authors combine two previously separate theories, extend the application of career crafting to an international career context and emphasise the role of temporality and the whole-life view of career in SIEs’ career crafting approach.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the impact of the internship experience on business students’ career intentions in regard to pursuing a career path in the same job function or industry as their internship.

After completing and reflecting on an internship, 198 undergraduate students responded to the prompt: “discuss the impact of the internship on your career consideration.” Responses were analyzed using a content analysis methodology in order to determine whether or not interns would pursue the same job functions (e.g. sales) or industry (e.g. non-profit) as their internship in their post-graduation job search.

Across the job functions and industries identified within the internships, 54 and 45 percent of interns confirmed their expectations of career fit, respectively. The implications of confirming and disconfirming these expectations for students are discussed.

Given the value of internships to business students, surprisingly few studies have examined their influence on undergraduates’ career considerations. Students select internships with the intention of learning about job functions or industries for possible career fit, yet the authors know little about whether the experience confirms or disconfirms their expectations. This study seeks to address this gap. The authors suggest that internships, as experiential activities, merit greater attention as they provide students opportunities to learn what they do or do not want to do, where they do or do not want to work and whether their self-concept fits a possible career path – saving themselves and potential employers the cost of job dissatisfaction and turnover.

The purpose of the present paper is to offer a career concept and culture framework for measuring and managing the alignment between people, strategy and culture and especially the motivational capital as the fit between people's motives and the organization's reward and appraisal systems.

A survey of 312 respondents in a multinational manufacturing firm using two questionnaires about their individual career concepts, motives, and their views about the organizational strategy and culture.

The results suggest that the career‐ and culture‐based motivational capital is positively associated with how effective the people view the strategy, how well‐functioning the structure is experienced, how relevant the performance appraisal is considered, how satisfied the people feel, and how long they stay in the organization.

Future research should add more multi‐item‐dependent variables, use more translated questionnaires into the respondents' own languages, and study more organizations in different industries to make further use of the career concept and culture model's ability to capture the fit between different persons and their organizations and the importance of this alignment.

Career and organizational development can improve the fit between individual career concepts and motives as well as organizational career culture and thereby contribute in several ways to higher performance, such as greater motivation, more positive views of the organization, and higher retention.

The paper provides a unique approach to understand and manage the alignment of different persons, HR systems, and organizational culture with greater precision.

As an increasingly important variable in the career field, career sustainability has received particular attention, yet few empirical studies have been conducted to examine its antecedents. The authors propose a moderated mediation model based on the goal-setting theory and the wise proactivity perspective for exploring when and how self-goal setting can influence career sustainability.

The authors use a time-lagged design and collect three waves of data from 1,260 teachers in basic education schools in China. The authors test the proposed hypotheses with SPSS 26.0 and Mplus 8.3.

The results show that self-goal setting positively relates to career sustainability and that career crafting plays a mediating role in this relationship. This relationship is strengthened when perceived organizational goal clarity is high.

The authors extend the application scenarios of the goal-setting theory to the field of career research and find out that self-goal setting is also a self-initiated and wise antecedent of career sustainability. From a wise proactivity perspective, the authors examine the mediating mechanism of career crafting to make positive career outcomes. Furthermore, the authors consider the impact of perceived organizational goal clarity as a boundary condition and broaden the understanding of “when to wise proactivity” from the goal-setting theory.

This paper discusses the well-publicized labor shortages in the building trades, reviews the causes for the deficiencies, and presents prescriptions for how career counselors and schools can play a critical role in encouraging young adults to consider construction occupations.

Using data from government agencies, trade organizations, and scholarly publications, this paper describes the categories of the building trades as well as their employment trends and compensation prospects. It also reviews the personal and environmental factors that could lead to the “construction of a construction career.”

This article documents the reasons for the labor shortages in the construction industry and then offers recommendation on how younger adults could be encouraged to consider the building trades as viable career alternatives.

Labor shortages in the construction industry have a direct and indirect deleterious effect on the economic well-being of every country. This article provides suggestions on how to inspire young adults to consider the building trades as worthwhile career pursuits.

There is a limited amount of scholarly attention given to career decision making related to occupations that do not require a college degree, including the building trades. This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by focusing on the individual characteristics and environmental factors that might prompt consideration of a career in the building trades. It also describes the educational, governmental, and corporate initiatives that work to encourage individuals, working in conjunction with their career counselors, to consider careers in the construction industry.

This study examines how the collective construction of career sustainability takes place through a career community of interim managers.

We draw on 31 interviews with interim managers who are part of a career community in the form of a professional association of interim managers in France.

The findings show the importance of career communities as a vehicle through which to create a sustainable career. More specifically, we show that occupational career communities provide mutual and reciprocal career support, collective being and belonging through sense-making as well as collective learning leading to the collective creation of a sustainable career.

We add to the literature on sustainable careers by providing a collective community-level analysis and make a theoretical contribution by using the concept of career communities in shedding light on the career sustainability of interim managers. In the light of the increase in non-standard forms of employment, career communities might become an interesting vehicle for career management and development.