Free Custom «Managing Careers: Theory and Practice» Essay Paper

Within the context of the boundaryless career critically analyze the challenges faced by graduates in a volatile global economy.”

Boundaryless careers are paths to occupations that are not bounded to specific organizations but grow through competency development that is based across organizations in an industry network. The rapid expansion of boundaryless careers has in the recent past outstripped the graduates understanding of the careers and their influence on the process and structure of their careers especially in this volatile global economy of today. Most of the graduates face a lot of challenges in trying to cope up with the boundaryless careers phenomenon in their human capital ability and competence development as they venture into different carriers after school (Baruch, 2004).

The challenges come in several ways including social, inter-firm and inter-organizations networks and methodological issues. The challenges have continuously increased in the recent past considering the volatile global economy state which is characterized by its huge amount of changes, complexity, and uncertainty. In the recent years, most developed countries have been exposed to what can be termed as the knowledge based economy. The implication of this state is a far reaching labor market transformation particularly in terms of occupational mobility, training and career development (Baruch, 2004)

 

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Graduate students now find careers to be more fragmented forcing them to move through a number of projects, firms and jobs in their lifetime. Despite the resistance from some of the victim graduates of these changes in careers and work organizations, the volatile global economy seem less concerned with these developments as the situation keeps getting worse. As the graduates try to be as mobile as possible to meet what the economy expects for them, their efforts end up being as unrealistic as myths (Baruch, 2004).

As the students enter the career world, they in most cases analyze the carriers from the unionized large hierarchical or internal labor market perspective where white-collar and blue-collar workers go up the hierarchical ladder to make their careers. However, the situation in the current volatile economy rarely addresses such nobilities. Most unions don’t provide room for quick models of closed internal market or ladder markets as the graduates would wish to have. Most graduates are full of the notion that they merit specific jobs. The uncertainty of the volatile economy makes it hard for them as its definition of competent personnel is a worker with a skilled notion and not specific job notion (Arnold, 1997).

The modern personnel management and industrial relations are based on business networks and flexible production in which the skill notion is essential. Young employees’ fresh from school venture in most careers to seek creativity and challenge. At some point even the wage demands have to be put aside as this happens to be the main or only preoccupation of these young inexperienced workers. This is because most of them settle for any kind of job as a result of a long unemployment period or due to their inability to break in other desirable careers. They have to settle for any job before them in order to achieve professional stability and at least some source of income (Jackson, 2000).

The majority are motivated by the search for freedom, challenge, autonomy and professional recognition. This situation in most cases results in divergence now that they had stayed for long periods without being employed or had troubles in breaking through to careers of their choices. This divergence in most cases is met with some resistance from the employers, colleagues, and the new sector at large because of the stimulation to retain and attract workers.

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The graduates working experience is observed to be with major carrier shifts leading them to different working environments some of which they are not even familiar with. The high unemployment rates among the graduates lead them to rash into any job opportunity that comes their way. This result in them working in areas they are not aware of making it hard for them. Competency portfolio comes to question as an underlining factor in the freedom of such employees. The end result is that the newly appointed workers continue making carrier and work choices even when they are not aware of their implication to their carriers as well as their employers (Arthur and Pringle, 1999).

Such choices get translated to competency effects that are mostly derived from the workers real-life experience. Thus it is a circular flow originating from individual experiences in forming career competencies that creates career capital which makes sense only to the workers context (Arthur and Pringle, 1999). The workers also put most of their efforts on the challenges arising in their careers compromising their performance. Such career strategies are mostly oriented towards their role and the sense such role make for the employee. Fresh employees are observed to have strong autonomy desires and gaining work responsibility. The desire is a consequent of the possibility of the workers to express creativity and initiative spirit. The self-image of the workers rest at a larger extent on self-fulfilling opportunities and work development