Career Anchors Reimagined, 5th Edition

3The Changing Nature of the External and Internal Career

Dr. Seuss:

“… Oh, the places you'll go!

There is fun to be done!

There are points to be scored.

There are games to be won.”

Over the past decade and particularly during the height of the Covid‐19 pandemic, the career concept has undergone a subtle shift. VUCAA has made the notion of a “standard” career increasingly slippery and ambiguous. To think of the career as, say, a lifelong set of formal and more or less predictable steps through job movements and/or promotions to a final stage leading to retirement from the workforce is gradually going out of fashion as impermanence characterizes the occupational landscape. Better to think of occupational and organizational careers as a set of jobs undertaken over time within a given context.

The “External” Career

A career from this broad perspective is what you put on your résumé (or sometimes leave out). It is a formal recounting of your occupational history in terms of the jobs you have held and places you have worked. This more or less objective representation of your work history we call the “external” career to distinguish it from the subjective representation of the career in terms of how we feel about our work over time, how our work becomes attached (or not) to our sense of self or personal identity, and how it organizes our thinking about our occupation.

Examples of external careers include those of tradespeople, who go through formal apprenticeships and licensing; ...