ANALYSING THE EXTENT AND NATURE OF CAREER CRISIS FACED BY PROFESSIONALS IN THE CONTEMPORARY TIMES, AND EXPLORING PRACTICAL STRATEGIES TO NAVIGATE ONE'S CAREER SUCCESSFULLY
Abstract
Many people across the world have been regularly facing a career crisis at different stages of their career and life. The combo effect of COVID-19 pandemic that among other things, fast forwarded the digital transformation across the world, coupled with ongoing economic downturns, political strife, global conflicts, and disruptions in supply chains, etc., has had a telling impact on the businesses across industry verticals and around the globe. These developments in turn are not only putting a big question mark on the availability and continuity of present jobs and occupations, but also reshaping the future of work and careers, thereby creating huge uncertainties in the minds of professionals in the recent times. Careers have come to an inflection point, where people have been constrained to focus more on short-term survival and staying afloat, rather than long-term career progression. There are more unanswered questions and grey areas around careers than were before. This research paper is an outcome of a mixed methods research utilizing leveraging both “quantitative” and “qualitative” research methods, to not only address the numerous dilemmas and ambiguities that professionals are confronted with in their career life cycle during recent times, but also measure the extent and nature of career crisis faced by them coupled with exploring practical strategies from experts to navigate one's career successfully. Among other things, study shows that the concept of “mid-career crisis” is irrelevant in the recent times. A career crisis could occur at any stage of the career, or even multiple times in one’s career life cycle. With the recent advancement of technologies and the rapid pace of obsolescence and joblessness, careers have not become irrelevant, however, career paths have become more uneven and unpredictable and ownership of managing one’s career has shifted primarily to the individual themselves. Professionals often tend to unconsciously go through the career crisis stage, without even realising or acknowledging it many times. The situation calls for a proactive approach, starting with alignment of one’s passion and purpose with the work, increasing the pace of learning new skills to stay relevant, and enhancing one’s contribution to meet and exceed the organizational expectations. The learnings from the professionals who faced career crisis in the past and nuggets of wisdom from senior Business Heads and CHROs, shared in the research paper, provide a valuable reservoir for helping professionals manage any potential career crisis in future.
Keyword : Career, Mid-career crisis, Career development, Managing careers
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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