Probing the Antecedents and Nature of Career Success

Résumé En

The purpose of this symposium is to meta-analytically review the career success literature, as well as to enrich and extend this literature by exploring four fundamental questions about the nature of career success. First, what is unique and what is common about how career success is conceptualized and attained in different career fields? Second, how might individual and contextual predictors interact in affecting career outcomes? Third, might the received conceptualization of career success as a cumulative outcome be usefully supplemented by reconceptualizing it as an emergent process? Finally and perhaps most controversially, is there really such a thing as objective career success? The opening paper, Objective and Subjective Career Success: A Meta-Analysis of Predictors, will provide an updated meta-analytic response to the perennial question: What predicts career success? The second paper, a qualitative study on Career Success in the Context of School Teaching and Business, will explore the meaning of career success and forms of career capital that enable it within different career fields. The third paper will be a quantitative study on Predicting Career Success: The Joint Impact of Trait Competitiveness and Competitive Climate at Work. The final two conceptual papers will critique some of the most well-established foundations of the careers literature by exploring the potential merit of reconceptualizing Career Success as an Emergent Process, and also When and Why Objective Career Success Deserves a Demotion. Each of the five papers aims to address the imperative for more nuanced approaches to conceptualizing and/or studying career success.