Career Anchors to Guide, Stabilize and Integrate Career Choices in 21st Century

Abstract

21st Century Organizations are going through rapid transformation by many ways restructuring, downsizing, rightsizing, learning organization and so on. These changes in the world of work especially the size and degree of centralization as critical dimensions impacting on career decisions of an employee. Traditional concept of careers that almost spans for lifetime doing one type of work, in one organization does not exist in the contemporary occupational environment. Choosing a career is one of the crucial decisions an individual make in his or her life. Overall career spreads across longest and quality time span of our life cycle. If the selected career is related to individual interest and skills, needs and value career stability and success is ensured. In this article desk research is carried out to review the various secondary data sources research articles, websites, blogs to explore career anchors as useful tool to understand individual talent, needs and values. These acts as constraints to guide, stabilize, and integrate the career choices. Career anchors could be regarded as valid and reliable diagnostic tool for career choices especially at mid-career stage as employees are in better position to understand their talents, needs and values. High level of Job Satisfaction can be achieved when there is high level of correlation between career anchors and occupational type. Career anchors are difficult to predict ahead of time. Person’s past work experiences, interests, aptitudes, and orientations converge into a meaningful pattern or career anchor that helps to show what is personally the most important in driving the person’s career choices. To conclude each individual might have a combination of two or more career anchors, but one has to identify the most predominant one, to understand his/her career needs and aspirations to make wise career decisions in the 21st Century volatile work environment.