Career self-management as resource management through action regulation: Theoretical concepts and practice implications for promoting career management skills

Career management skills are important in today’s labour market, which is characterised by increased volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. This chapter aims to provide a better understanding of core career management skills by presenting a framework which sees career self-management as an active process of resource management. Based on this perspective, career self-management consists of building, maintaining, and applying knowledge and skills, psychological (motivational/attitudinal), and contextual resources through various career self-management behaviours. Moreover, career self-management skills can be enhanced throughout the lifespan by presenting career self-management as an action-regulation process. This process consists of four phases: (1) goal setting and development, (2) mapping the environment for goal-relevant resources and barriers, (3) planning and execution of behaviours, and (4) monitoring and feedback processing. Based on this conceptualisation of career self-management, we discuss how practitioners can assist clients in this process across different action regulation phases of career self-management.

In L. Sovet, A. Chant, J. Katsarov, & J. Pouyaud (Eds.), Building Career Management Skills (pp. 52-69). Network for Innovation in Career Guidance and Counselling in Europe (NICE)