Career Management

Essay by popdaddy008University, Master'sA+, October 2004

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Career Management

For both the professional and the human resource manager, the changing nature and development of careers serves as the basis for a considerable amount of change and obfuscation. As such there is an impetus to explore the current factors that influence careers in organizations, the implications of these factors and how employees and organizations should view career success. To this end, this investigation considers these issues to provide a more comprehensive overview of how modern careers can affect the organization overall. By critically examining these issues it will be possible to garner a better understanding of the importance of career to the individual as well as to the organization.

Considering first the context of career as it applies to the individual, Heritage makes the following observation: "To think of a career as a linear, step-by-step advancement up the corporate ladder is not only to exclude all the other ways in which people make their living, but also to fail to take into account the environment in which we now work - an environment that is characterized by unprecedented rates of change" (Heritage, 16).

What this effectively suggests is that the traditional ideology of the career as a linear path of progress no longer exists. Instead, the development of a career has been replaced with a less traditional model that often provides little cohesion for the individual.

Examining the factors that are affecting careers in the modern organization Heritage goes on to note that because the fundamental nature of the organization is becoming more flexible to accommodate new business styles, the types of employees that are needed is changing as well. "In today's environment there is widespread career uncertainty. Secure jobs with regular tasks, pay, hours and place of work are disappearing, and increasingly being replaced by more loose...