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The purpose of this paper is to conceptually articulate the differing needs of graduates and graduate employers, which can be competing or complementary in nature. Drawing from theoretical frameworks of career ecosystems and the new psychological contract, a set of propositions are presented using three themes: career management, development of talent and technological change.

A conceptual design offering a conceptual model through adopting the career ecosystem and new psychological contract as a framework.

These propositions offer a new conceptual model, which provides a practical contribution by articulating sustainability of graduates’ careers through employability at the graduate level and competitive advantage at the employer level.

The paper offers important contributions to theory by connecting career management and vocational career literature through acknowledging shared constructs of life-long learning and sustainable employability for graduates. These two streams are often developed in parallel, thus this paper helps to bridge the gaps in respective research agendas. This paper therefore has the originality of helping to advance the fields of career theory and sustainable human resource management.

Drawing on a theoretical framework of sustainable career ecosystem theory, our paper aims to consider how domestic and international postgraduates can enhance their employability through participation in a landscape of practice.

The study employed an exploratory, longitudinal case study design to capture students' lived experiences on an 18-month Master of Professional Practice course at a higher education institution in New Zealand. The data collection procedure involved field note observations (months 1–4), a focus group (month 13) and narrative frames (months 16–18). The sample was domestic students from New Zealand (n = 2) and international students from Asia (n = 5).

One’s participation in multiple communities of practice represents their landscape of practice and a commitment to lifewide learning. Through participation in various communities of practice, domestic and international students can enhance their employability in three ways: (1) boundary encounters to develop social capital, (2) transcending contexts to enhance cultural capital, and (3) acknowledging the development of psychological capital and career agency.

Our work offers one of the earliest empirical validations of sustainable career ecosystem theory. Expressly, communities of practice represent various contexts whereby employability capital is developed over time. Additionally, the postgraduate students themselves are portrayed as interconnected and interdependent actors, presenting a novel framing of such dependencies at the micro-level of the ecosystem. The practical implications come from informing universities of the value of a landscape of practice to enhance the employability of domestic and international students in preparation for sustainable careers and to promote the sustainability of the career ecosystem.

The purpose of this article is to compare the effects of global competitive pressures on the UK and French B-schools' management systems through the lens of career ecosystems.

This is a qualitative inquiry employing in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 44 business school academics in the two countries.

This paper demonstrates the importance of top-down and bottom-up ecosystem influences for creating contrasting performance management systems in competitive B-schools in the two countries, to different outcomes for institutions and faculty careers.

The authors focus on faculty working in top business schools, which limits the generalizability of the findings. Future research could apply the ecosystem lens to other institutions and geographical areas to highlight best practices and evaluate their transferability across borders.

The study highlights alternative HR practices and potentially workable adjustments to current systems that could be envisaged in order to enhance performance of individuals and institutions without jeopardizing the chances of valuable human resources to bring their contributions to the success of B-schools.

This paper compares and contrasts different performance management systems, taking into account exogenous and endogenous influences on B-schools that operate in a highly competitive and rapidly changing global management education market.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how students perceive their future careers and how university has prepared them to enter the global labor market; student perceptions regarding benefits vs associated costs of pursuing higher education (HE) on employability and earnings; and the anticipated barriers and how to overcome these in pursuit of career sustainability within a career ecosystem.

The authors adopted a qualitative method using semi-structured interviews on a small sample of 38 final year students from a UK university who were also participants in an earlier two-wave quantitative survey, which was conducted with 387 penultimate and final year undergraduates from the same UK-based University.

Findings revealed that undergraduates perceive their investment in HE to offer a net financial gain; however, this is narrowing due to increased tuition fees, associated student debt and interest payments eroding earning premiums. As undergraduates progress, they feel more employable from a personal perspective, but less employable from a market perspective due to competition for graduate jobs and the cost/benefit conflict of resources.

The authors provide nine opportunities for enhancing the employability of graduates collaborating with graduate employers, providing a timely contribution to the social, political and economic debate on the funding of HE.

The authors advance career theory via the new perspective of Career Ecosystem Theory by: explaining student career perceptions in terms of how university has prepared them for the global labor market; exploring the perceived costs vs benefits of pursuing HE in relation to employability; suggesting a two-dimensional model of personal and market factors of employability; providing a model of careers advice from employers and universities for supporting students’ careers; and offering policy implications in relation to the future funding of HE and employability of future graduates.

The purpose of this study is to understand how universities and organizations have responded to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of preparing university students and recent graduates to enter the global labor market, using the accounting, banking and finance sector as a case study. The two research questions are (1) How can university career services and organizations work individually and collaboratively to best develop early career talent following the COVID-19 pandemic? (2) What are the challenges that university career services and organizations face when working individually or collaboratively to develop early career talent following the COVID-19 pandemic?

The data for thematic analysis comes from 36 semi-structured interviews with career advisors (CAs) (n = 19) and graduate recruiters (GRs) (n = 17).

This study offers some of the first findings on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, helping to ensure that organizational behavior and career theory literature reflect the dramatically changing landscape in the university-to-work transition.

Theoretically, our contribution comes from applying a framework of the career construction theory (CTT) within the context of a career ecosystem to understand the views of the intermediary, meso-level actors, which, to date, have lacked representation within career literature. Practically, we provide an insightful bridge between universities and organizations, offering opportunities for greater collaboration, and enhanced outcomes for all stakeholders.

Human capital and boundaryless career theory prevail in studies that examine objective and subjective career success respectively. However, evidence indicating that each framework offers superior suitability for its respective career outcome is unclear. The purpose of this study is to contrast the predictive validity of the frameworks with respect to both career success criteria.

The sample involved 182 management faculty in the USA. The authors relied on hierarchical regression analyses to test the study hypotheses.

Results indicate that human capital outperforms mobility across career success criteria. Yet, this study found that industry segment amplifies the effect of mobility on career success.

While findings primarily speak to the superiority of human capital as a career success antecedent, the significant effect of the industry segment as moderator of mobility calls for a granular definition of the setting where careers are analyzed. Replication of findings across industries are needed before assuming the generalization of results.

Findings reveal the relevance of early career movements for professional careers in academe.

Despite the extensive use of human capital and mobility as antecedents of career success, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that directly contrasts the predictive validity of these competing antecedents.

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.

By relying on a sustainable career perspective and recent studies on senior employees’ late career phase, this study aims to examine senior (50+) nurses’ late career narratives in the context of extending retirement age. Given the current global nursing shortage, there is a pressing need to find ways on how to promote longer and sustainable careers in the health-care field. Yet, there is limited knowledge about the extended late career phase of senior nurses.

Empirical data were derived from 22 interviews collected among senior (50+) nursing professionals working in a Finnish university hospital. The qualitative interview data were analysed using a narrative analysis method. As a result of the narrative analysis, four career narratives were constructed.

The findings demonstrated that senior nurses’ late career narratives differed in terms of late career aspirations, constraints, mobility and active agency of one’s own career. The identified career narratives indicate that the building blocks of sustainable late careers in the context of extending retirement age are diverse.

The qualitative interview data were restricted to senior nurses working in one university hospital. Interviews were conducted on site and some nurses were called away leaving some of the interviews shorter than expected.

To support sustainable late careers requires that attention be based on the whole career ecosystem covering individual, organizational and societal aspects and how they are intertwined together.

So far, few studies have investigated the extended late career phase of senior employees in the context of a changing career landscape.

The study explores the perceptions of graduates on their employability and future of work, in light of the challenges thrown upon by new vicissitudes in the work environment. The study intends to assess the preparedness of management graduates in facing the challenges and uncertainties of the actual job market.

Semi-structured and informal interviews with 65 management graduates from UK, Canada, Italy and India. The thematic analysis uncovered the concerns and areas to develop for management graduates regarding their future employability perceptions.

The authors benefited from a unique opportunity to capture the views and experience of graduates who are undergoing management education during this ambiguous period. Three major themes were developed on how to develop oneself for an ambiguous future of work which includes Psychological strengths, Skill enhancement and Future mindset. The study also unearthed the major focus areas for better employability from a graduate perspective.

Practical contribution comes from strategies to prepare university graduates for sustainable careers. Study hints at the importance of work experience, adaptability and skill enhancement in meeting the challenges of the future.

From a global approach this is one among the first studies to look into the graduate perspective of their preparedness for future work.

This qualitative study explores, through the lens of Schein's (1978) career anchor theory, the internal career perceptions (self-perceived values, challenges and capabilities) of local surf workers in the highly internationalized sector of surf tourism in Nicaragua.

Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 22 local surf tourism workers. Participant experiences were analyzed using thematic analysis to distinguish their career anchor orientations.

The results indicate the sustained value and instrumentality of Schein's original career anchor theory, specifically in terms of the interconnectedness of dominant and supporting anchors and the relevance of anchor groupings for workers in non-standard working environments. The anchors of lifestyle, entrepreneurial creativity, and security and stability were closely interrelated and complementary, as participants from this context were ultimately striving for security and stability.

Future research should consider more explicitly the role of the socio-political, environmental or economic context in shaping the internal career self-concepts and experiences of workers.

This study sheds light on the internal career drivers — the unique dilemmas, challenges, passions and motives — of local workers in a resource-constrained environment. Managers, business owners and other economic actors stand to gain important insights into the realities of workers they employ, but do not intimately understand. Such insights could be generalizable to a variety of work settings in which there are high material, social or cultural constraints.

Non-standard work contexts and local worker voices are both thematically underrepresented in the careers scholarship. Research on these topics can contribute to broader discussions of sustainability, sustainable development goals and decolonial perspectives in social science scholarship. Bringing local workers from the Global South into view means turning scholarly attention towards less-visible “others” working alongside those having received the lion's share of academic discussion, i.e. expatriate workers on a global assignment or self-initiated expatriates, most often from the Global North.

This is one of the first studies to explore the career anchors of local workers in the Global South in a non-standard, non-bureaucratic vocational setting. The study sheds light on local workers' career decisions, an often-neglected perspective within international human resource management.