Collection of research-based models and tools developed to promote career development and sustainable working lives.
Each resource translates scientific insights into practical approaches that help individuals, leaders, and organizations foster meaningful, adaptive, and resourceful careers. I invite you to explore and use these materials to support your work, research, teaching, or personal development.
All models and measurement instruments are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). They may be used, adapted, and shared for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes, provided proper attribution is given. Commercial use requires prior permission from the authors.
Research-Based Models
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This framework identifies the core competencies individuals need to effectively self-manage their careers. Grounded in a career self-regulation perspective, it distinguishes four key domains: developing and selecting meaningful career goals, identifying personal and contextual resources and barriers, creating and implementing concrete action plans, and monitoring and revising goals and actions. Together, these competencies describe the essential capabilities that enable people to navigate dynamic and self-directed career paths successfully.
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The Umbrella Concept for Career Counseling provides a national, evidence-based framework for vocational, study, and career counseling in Switzerland. It integrates leading theories of career self-regulation, social-cognitive career design, and career construction to outline the key areas, processes, and ethical principles of effective counseling. The model structures counseling into four dynamic areas—developing career goals, exploring resources and barriers, implementing action plans, and reviewing and adjusting plans—while emphasizing the promotion of clients’ agency, adaptability, and proactivity across all life stages and contexts.
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The Whole-Life Career Counseling Framework provides a systematic model for helping individuals manage their careers across work and nonwork life domains. Grounded in an action-regulation perspective, it structures counseling into four phases: clarifying work and nonwork goals and their interrelations, mapping resources and barriers, developing action strategies, and monitoring and adapting plans. The model supports clients in aligning their career development with personal values and life roles, fostering balance, adaptability, and meaningful goal pursuit across the entire life span.
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The Career Action Regulation Framework conceptualizes career self-management as a dynamic self-regulatory process through which individuals actively shape their careers in line with personal goals and contextual opportunities. It outlines four key processes—developing and selecting career goals, seeking information and resources, planning and executing goal-directed behaviors, and monitoring and revising actions based on feedback. This model integrates cognitive, motivational, and behavioral components of self-regulation, emphasizing how people can manage their careers in a self-directed, proactive, and adaptive manner within changing work environments.
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The Career Resources Framework provides an integrative model of the personal, social, and environmental resourcesthat enable successful and sustainable career development. It distinguishes 13 key resources and behaviors across four domains: knowledge and skills, motivation, environment, and career management behaviors. Together, these elements describe how people can build, maintain, and use resources to achieve career success, satisfaction, and long-term employability in a changing world of work.
Scientific publications of the framework (First conceptualization Hirschi, 2012; revised framework and measurement Hirschi et al. 2018; German-language measure Hirschi et al. 2019)
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This framework provides an integrative overview of seven core behaviors through which individuals can proactively develop and manage their careers. It distinguishes between behaviors aimed at building personal and social capital (e.g., developing skills, networking, managing impressions), setting and pursuing goals (e.g., goal setting and planning, self-exploration), and creating future opportunities (e.g., exploring mobility options, seeking feedback). Together, these behaviors describe how people can actively shape their career paths to enhance employability, adaptability, and success over time.
Measurement Scales
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The CSM-C Scale assesses individuals’ core competencies required for successful career self-management, grounded in a career self-regulation framework. It measures the ability to (1) develop and select meaningful career goals, (2) identify personal and contextual resources and barriers, (3) create and implement concrete career action plans, and (4) monitor and adapt goals and plans based on feedback. The validated 8-item (and extended 19-item) versions provide reliable, behaviorally anchored indicators of a person’s capacity to proactively manage their career and predict key outcomes such as employability, workplace status, and career satisfaction.
Measurement document (German / English)
To complement the measurement scale, I have outlined behavioral indicators for the four CSM-C at Basic, Intermediate, and Expert levels. This can be used to qualitatively evaluate CSM-C in counseling and HR practice (German/English).
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The Career Self-Management Behaviors Scale captures how individuals actively shape their careers through seven distinct types of proactive actions: impression management, building and using social contacts, human capital development, goal setting and planning, self-exploration, and mobility-oriented behavior. The measure assesses concrete behaviors such as developing career goals, seeking feedback, networking, skill development, and exploring job opportunities, reflecting both general and specific facets of career self-management. It provides a comprehensive and validated tool for researchers and practitioners to evaluate proactive career behaviors and their links to employability and career success.
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The Career Strivings Measure assesses individuals’ long-term, values-related career goals across three domains: self-enhancement (money, power, prestige), self-transcendence (helping others, contributing to society), and personal growth (learning, development). It provides a reliable and validated instrument to understand what people pursue in their careers and how these underlying motives relate to work and life outcomes such as career satisfaction, commitment, and life meaningfulness. The scale is available in English and German versions for research and applied use in career development and counseling contexts.
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The Career Resources Questionnaire provides a comprehensive assessment of the key factors that enable career success. It measures 13 distinct, actionable resources across four domains: knowledge and skills (e.g., occupational expertise, labor market knowledge, soft skills), motivation (e.g., confidence, clarity, involvement), environment (e.g., career opportunities, organizational support, social support, job challenge), and career management behaviors (e.g., networking, career exploration, continuous learning). The CRQ offers reliable and validated insights for identifying individuals’ career strengths and development areas and is available in both employee and student versions for use in research, counseling, and organizational development.
Scientific publication (Original-English/ German scale)
Measurement document (German / English)
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The Career Preparedness Scale assesses adolescents’ psychological readiness to engage in career development tasks, including their motivation, beliefs, and attitudes toward managing future careers. It integrates key constructs from social cognitive and career adaptability theories, offering a holistic measure of self-regulation and agency in career development during adolescence. The scale is validated across samples from different countries and can be used for research, counseling, and program evaluation.
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The MU-CI-S assesses individuals’ thoughts and worries that key aspects of their future career might develop undesirably, providing a comprehensive view of perceived career insecurity. It captures eight dimensions, including concerns about career opportunities, job prestige, contractual conditions, unemployment, workplace change, retirement, work–nonwork interaction, and resource–demand discrepancies. The scale demonstrates strong psychometric properties and is suitable for research and applied use in career counseling, organizational diagnostics, and employee development.
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The Ambition Scale measures a person’s persistent and generalized striving for success, attainment, and accomplishment as a stable personal disposition. It captures the motivational drive to set challenging goals, pursue outstanding achievements, and accomplish great things across various life domains. The brief 5-item instrument provides a psychometrically sound tool to assess ambition as a general trait distinct from related constructs such as achievement striving or competitiveness and has demonstrated predictive validity for both objective (e.g., salary, promotions) and subjective (e.g., career satisfaction) indicators of career success.
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The Career Engagement Scale measures the degree to which individuals proactively engage in developing their careers through behaviors such as planning, exploration, networking, and skill development. It captures a general behavioral tendency toward active career self-management among students and professionals and has demonstrated strong reliability, validity, and measurement invariance across groups and over time. The scale is widely used in research and practice to assess proactive career development and to evaluate interventions promoting career self-management.
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The AR-WF Scale measures how individuals actively manage their work and family roles through self-regulatory behaviors aimed at achieving valued goals across both domains. It captures five key phases of goal-directed action: (1) developing and selecting work–family goals, (2) mapping resources and barriers, (3) planning concrete actions, (4) monitoring goal progress, and (5) processing feedback and adapting plans. The 15-item instrument provides a validated and theoretically grounded tool for examining how proactive goal regulation at the work–family interface contributes to outcomes such as goal attainment, enrichment, and conflict between work and family life.