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Multiple jobholders’ workplace learning is an under-researched theme, although it offers possibilities to add knowledge of learning at several workplaces at a time. The purpose of this study is to explore the career development and workplace learning of Finnish multiple jobholders with university degree.

The qualitative extreme case study of “elite multiple jobholders” was based on 45 in-depth interviews, which were analysed by abductive content analysis using the chaos theory of careers (CTC).

This study showed that elite multiple jobholders were attracted by meaningful jobs, which were significant, had broader purposes or offered possibilities for self-realization and self-development, whereas they criticized paid work organizations. They tried to anticipate the future working life and labour markets and adjusted their careers to them by educating and by choosing jobs with learning possibilities. However, they saw themselves as constructers of the future, which left them at vulnerable position concerning the institutional setting. They organized their work flexibly with different contracts and their professional identities were networked.

This study is limited in Finns with university degree. Future research should inspect multiple jobholders with lower degree educations, in different contexts and with other methodologies.

This study gives an example of applying CTC as a holistic framework to study how individual careers emerge contextually and how they are recursively connected to work organization and working life changes. Possibilities to understand fractals are offered.

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.

While women are increasingly in senior positions in accountancy firms, a century after gaining entry to this once exclusively male field, they are still struggling to achieve career success. The concept of possible selves and a model of career crafting are activated in an analysis of how a set of New Zealand professional accountants have pursued their careers. This paper aims to focus on how people actively craft career selves in the context of organisational and gendered constraints, some of which are self-imposed, and therefore, can be modified and revised.

Interviews with 36 male and female accounting professionals in New Zealand – 21 working in private firms and 15 in academia identify how careers are shaped by contexts, cultural understandings of gender, organisational structures within which accountants are located and wider environmental factors.

Women accountants in this study are both agential and responsive to a range of constraints they encounter. These women challenge the notion that professional achievement requires single minded allegiance to a career; their strategic career crafting demonstrates how career and family commitments are not irreconcilable but can be skilfully integrated to nurture multiple selves. Their strategies are considered alongside those of a comparable set of male accountants.

This paper contributes to the literature on possible selves and the complexity of gendered lives through the application of a career crafting matrix to explore how accounting professionals forge careers and construct multiple selves.

The purpose of this paper is to examine artists’ experiences of involuntary career transitions and its impact on their work-related identities.

Semi-structured interviews with 40 artists in the Netherlands were conducted. Self-narratives were used to analyze the findings.

Artists who can no longer make a living out of their artistic activities are forced to start working outside the creative realm and are gradually pushed away from the creative industries. This loss of their creative identity leads to psychological stress and grief, making the professional transition problematic. Moreover, the artistic community often condemns an artist’s transition to other activities, making the transition psychologically even more straining.

This study provides in-depth insights into how artists deal with changes in their work-related identities in the light of involuntary career transitions.

Schein (1985) defines a career anchor as a person's perceived area of competence, values, and motives that he or she would not want to forfeit when faced with a career decision that might prevent him or her from fulfilling it. Hardin, Stocks and Graves (2001) utilized Schein's Career Orientation Inventory to determine the predominant career anchors of Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) and to investigate the relationship of CPA career anchor and job setting. This chapter builds on the Hardin et al. study and focuses on the younger professional accountant. This younger generation of accountants are part of the millennial generation, which prior research has indicated vary significantly in their wants, values, and desires for an employment situation. Based on the survey results, 46.1% of the millennials possess a Lifestyle career anchor, 18.0% possess a Security career anchor, and 12.4% possess a Service career anchor. Each of the other five career anchors were selected by fewer than 8.0% of the respondents. The results suggest the career anchors of today's millennial professional accountants differ from those of professional accountants some 15 years ago. In particular, the Security career anchor is far more prevalent than in the past, which suggests millennial accountants have an increased interest in job security. This research provides important information to organizations seeking to recruit and retain young accounting professionals. Similarly, young professionals should be aware of their career anchor, so they can manage their career choices, rather than conform to choices that others make for them.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the precarious nature of creative industries (CIs) work in Australia, Canada and the Netherlands, with a focus on job security, initial and on-going training and education, and access to benefits and protection.

The paper reports from a largely qualitative study featuring an in-depth survey answered by 752 creative workers in the three locations.

Survey data identified common themes including an increase in non-standard forms of employment and the persistence of precarious work across the career lifespan; criticism of initial education and training with particular reference to business skills; the need for and challenges of life-long professional learning; and lack of awareness about and access to benefits and protection. Respondents also reported multiple roles across and beyond the CIs.

The presence of common themes suggests avenues for future, targeted creative workforce research and signals the need for change and action by CIs educators, policy makers and representative organizations such as trade unions.

While precarious labour is common across the CIs and has attracted the attention of researchers worldwide, a lack of comparative studies has made it difficult to identify themes or issues that are common across multiple locations.

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.

This research examined the presence of career orientation profiles by investigating how young workers combined protean career orientation attitudes, motivation to learn to develop one's career and an optimistic future perspective on their career. It explored how a differentiated endorsement of these attitudes and motivation (i.e. career orientation profiles) were associated with the adoption of multiple career-enhancing behaviors, namely proactive career behaviors (i.e. career planning, networking and skill development) and learning behaviors with technologies.

Latent profile analysis was conducted among young individuals starting their career (N = 767) and found four distinct profiles.

The first profile revealed that 17.2% of workers in this sample were displaying low levels in protean career orientation, motivation to learn and optimistic future time perspective (profile 1). Two differentiated profiles showed either low levels of protean career orientation and high levels of motivation to learn (profile 2) or high levels of protean career attitudes and low levels of motivation to learn (profile 3). These profiles presented an average level of future time perspective and represented 13.8 and 40.6% of the sample. Finally, 28.4% of the sample showed high levels on all these variables (profile 4).

Only young workers who showed high levels on all these indicators also presented high levels of proactive behaviors and learning with technologies. The other three profiles were associated with suboptimal levels on these outcomes. Taken together, these results offer new insights into the psychological state of mind of workers most adapted to succeed in a modern career.

This study aims to compare the career patterns of Matures, Baby Boomers, Generation Xers and Millennials over the various stages of their careers to determine whether there have been notable shifts away from the “traditional” career model characterized by long‐term linear, upward career movement, toward a “modern” career model characterized by increased job mobility, organizational mobility and multi‐directional career movement.

The retrospective career accounts of 105 Canadians were gathered through review of résumé information and semi‐structured interviews. The job changes and organizational changes experienced by each respondent in each five‐year career period (e.g. age 20‐24, 25‐29) and the direction of job changes (i.e. upward, downward, lateral or change of career track) were recorded. The generations were compared statistically on each of these measures through analysis of variance (ANOVA).

Significant inter‐generational differences were observed on all variables of interest, but the differences were largely restricted to the age 20‐24 and 30‐34 career stages.

The study relied on a small sample because of the qualitative nature of the data collection. The sample was also exclusively Canadian. The results should therefore be interpreted with care and the research should be replicated with different types of respondents and in different cultural contexts.

The research demonstrates to employers that the younger generations change jobs and employers at a greater rate than previous generations and that they are more willing to accept non‐upward career moves. Recruiting and retaining young employees will therefore require a different approach than was used for previous generations.

The use of retrospective accounts allowed for the comparison of generations within various career stages. This overcomes a significant limitation of cross‐sectional studies of generational phenomena by simultaneously considering life‐cycle and generational cohort effects.

Modern careers have become increasingly non‐predictable, characterized by many occupational changes and transitions. Given this background, this paper analyses the potential contributions of the anthropological concept of rites of passage in scientific as well as practical terms. It is argued that, while this concept is not a fully developed theory, it qualifies as a useful model for specific aspects of career transitions.

After a general introduction of the concept of rites of passage, the paper examines how it has already been applied to career research, and proposes some fresh developments in order to interpret the role of transitions in modern careers.

Although the concept of rites de passage has mostly been applied to very traditional career paths, this paper argues for its validity for modern careers. In particular, the emphasis on a particular rite de passage, namely the rite de marge, allows one to focus on the non‐stability of careers today and its consequences for individuals.

Even if the effects of their application are neither mechanical nor calculable, nevertheless rites de passage present interesting possibilities for management purposes.

Introducing the concept of rites de passage shows that modern careers especially, because of their lack of stability, need transitional rites for occupational identity and the entering of new groups. To be aware of this is of great relevance for individuals and for career management.