Challenging career models in higher education: the influence of internal career scripts and the rise of the “concertina” career

The paper develops the metaphorical concept of the “concertina” career to describe ways in which academic staff, across a diversifying workforce, modulate their interactions with institutional career frameworks, which tend to be unilinear and to be characterised by detailed progression criteria and milestones. In doing this, they are guided by Internal career scripts, providing an additional dimension to the dichotomy of boundaried and boundaryless careers found in the literature. Drawing on a longitudinal study between 2017 and 2020, of forty-nine mid-career academic staff across eight UK universities, consideration is given to individuals’ spatial movements, for instance, between academic activities, and professional and personal commitments; and the manipulation of timescales to accelerate or decelerate career progress in relation to opportunities and constraints. The study shows ways in which the spatial parameters of a career are being stretched in order to accommodate new forms of academic work supplementing disciplinary activity, such as online learning, employability initiatives and public engagement, as well as work-life considerations. In addition, individuals are adapting timescales to accommodate professional activities such as health practice or community outreach, as well as personal commitments such as caring responsibilities. Thus, in the concertina career, individuals expand and contract activity, as well as extending and compressing timescales. As a result, it is concluded that institutional career models do not entirely reflect the reality of career-making by individuals, which is likely to involve detours (therefore a spatial dimension) and a disruption of assumed timelines (therefore a temporal dimension).

A retrospective view from traditional to boundaryless career and career success

An increasingly dynamic career context has changed the nature of careers and led to the emergence of more autonomous and self-directed boundaryless careers. The common idea in different forms of boundaryless careers is mobility. Psychologically and physically mobile individuals start to manage their own careers in terms of their personal pursuits. In such a career environment, the nature of career success has also changed. The importance of subjective career success has been emphasized more than objective career success because only individuals themselves can meaningfully define and assess their career success with reference to their own self-defined standards, needs, and values in such an unstable environment. With the transmission of career responsibility to the individuals, the need to develop career competencies as knowing why competencies, knowing whom competencies, and knowing how competencies emerge in order to survive and become successful. This study reviews career concept and the new perspectives as a boundaryless career within a constantly changing environment which makes it impossible to become successful unless gaining new competencies and survival methods and the new perspectives on career success with a growing increase in subjective career success instead of objective career success

Place-Identity in boundaryless careers: Narratives of medical students from lower socio-economic class backgrounds

Medical schools are working to widen access to students from lower socio-economic backgrounds, particularly through targeted recruitment within under-doctored regions of the UK. Drawing upon recent research, this article explores ways that place- identity theory can be helpful to career professionals, particularly when thinking about the extent to which where individuals are from influences where they (can) go and what they might need to sacrifice to get there. Bounded student narratives expose the 'dark side' of the social mobility agenda and clash with the quasi-colonial 'world is your oyster' rhetoric of the boundaryless career. Implications for practice are discussed.