This study investigates the joint effects of individual characteristics and the labour market on career mobility. We propose that level of education, openness to experience, and a favourable labour market relate positively to employees crossing organizational, industrial, and occupational boundaries. Management programme alumni (N = 503) provided information through an online survey about their career histories, their level of education, and their openness to experience. Additionally, we used the unemployment rate as an indicator for yearly changes in the labour market. The results of our cross-classified multilevel analysis indicate that both individual characteristics and the labour market are determinants of career mobility. Level of education had a positive effect on organizational and industrial boundary crossing, and changes in the labour market related to organizational boundary crossing. Against our assumptions, openness to experience had no effect on career mobility, and none of the predictors were related to occupational boundary crossing. Our results demonstrate the importance of investigating career mobility from a boundary perspective combined with a focus on both individual and contextual characteristics. The dominance of education compared to personality and the difficulty of explaining occupational mobility open new research avenues and yield practical implications for employees, career counsellors, and organizations.

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The necessity to actively manage the work-home boundaries has drastically increased. We postulate that work-home integration may affect individuals' subjective career success via its positive effects on work goal attainment and exhaustion. Furthermore, we study perceived supervisor expectation for employee work-home integration as a boundary condition. Our three-wave online survey with 371 employees showed support for the two hypothesized moderated mediation effects. Work-home integration preference is indirectly related to subjective career success: (1) positively via home-to-work transitions and work goal attainment and (2) negatively via home-to-work transitions and exhaustion. Perceived supervisor expectation constrained work-home integration preference's direct effect on home-to-work transitions and indirect effects on subjective career success. Exploratory analysis revealed that exhaustion negatively affected all career success dimensions, whereas work goal attainment was only related to some. Our results indicate that supervisor expectation can override the effect of employee's work-home integration preference on home-to-work transitions which have a double-edged sword effect on subjective career success. Our study contributes to integrating the careers and work-life interface literature and incorporating contextual factors. Furthermore, with the exploration of differential effects on subjective career success, we advance our understanding of this outcome's nomological network.

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