Changing Demographics and the Shifting Nature of Careers

Abstract

Research on human resource development is needed to empirically document the changing nature of careers among successive generational cohorts of workers. This article offers a conceptual framework for examining shifting careers, which accounts for important demographic shifts occurring in the labor force. Our research framework provides a comprehensive set of career-related variables (including career expectations, experience, and outcomes) for investigation. We illustrate the need to consider confounding influences of other demographic shifts in the study of changing careers, using the Canadian context as an illustrative example. We further argue that generational differences may be confounded with gender, immigration, and socioeconomic effects, and therefore, all three effects need to be considered simultaneously with generation. We identify some of the challenges faced by organizations in adjusting to these shifts and conclude with directions for future research.

What HRD Is Doing—What HRD Should be Doing: The Case for Transforming HRD

“…HRD researchers have examined the distinction between knowledge work and other types of work (Jacobs, 2017) and have identified the competencies needed to perform knowledge work (Jacobs, 2017; Swanson, 2007). HRD researchers have identified new intervention strategies that account for both changes in workforce demographics and in the nature of careers (Lyons, Ng, & Schweitzer, 2014). HRD research also has examined ways to develop the workforce skills needed to keep pace with advances in technology (Yawson, 2010; Yawson & Greiman, 2016), to promote career pathways and other opportunities for 21st century workforce development (Scully-Russ, 2013), and to balance the need for individual employment security and the organization’s desire for flexibility (Kornelakis, 2014).…”

Positioning Work Amid Discontinuities and Continuities

“…The dialogical construction of meanings of work contributes to understandings of work meaning(fulness) as communicatively constituted in diverse and global contexts (Buzzanell & Lucas, 2013;Cheney, Zorn, Planalp, & Lair, 2008), constitutions of tensions in work meanings and career choices , changing global labor force profiles and shifting careers from generational perspectives (Favero & Heath, 2012;Lyons, Ng, & Schweitzer, 2014), and evolving worker-organization-state relationships and individual-organizationsociety problematics (Putnam & Mumby, 2014;Sias, 2014). It foregrounds a processual view of how Post80s workers assume different/opposing self-positions in connections to their familial, generational, and national communities to constitute work meanings, and teases out agency-constraint tensions in subjective constructions of work meanings by Post80s workers who are both participating in and being spoken to by multiple and contrary voices that are shaping an emerging Chinese socio-economic landscape.…”

An Exploratory Study on Intergenerational Learning in Indian IT Workspace

“…One such problem that has a significant impact on organisational sustenance is the ability of the organisations to accomplish the continuous development of their people, a key business driver (Rupčic, 2018). Organisations today are facing a more intense need to adapt their processes and people than they did earlier due to continuously changing needs and expectations of different generations working together (Lyons et al, 2014). This need requires organisations to take up appropriate learning and developmental interventions to harness the skills and capabilities of their people.…”