Career self-management as resource management through action regulation: Theoretical concepts and practice implications for promoting career management skills
Schläpfer, D., Wilhelm, F., & Hirschi, A. (2025). Career self-management as resource management through action regulation: Theoretical concepts and practice implications for promoting career management skills. In L. Sovet, A. Chant, J. Katsarov, & J. Pouyaud (Eds.), Building Career Management Skills (pp. 56-73). Network for Innovation in Career Guidance and Counselling in Europe. https://www.nice-network.eu/
Abstract
Career management skills are important in today’s labor market, which is characterized by increased volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. This chapter aims to provide a better understanding of core career management skills by presenting a framework which sees career self-management as an active process of resource management. Based on this perspective, career self-management consists of building, maintaining, and applying knowledge and skills, psychological (motivational/ attitudinal), and contextual resources through various career self-management behaviors. We moreover suggest how career self-management skills can be enhanced throughout the lifespan by presenting career self-management as an action-regulation process. This process consists of four phases in terms of (1) goal setting and development, (2) mapping the environment for goal-relevant resources and barriers, (3) planning and execution of behaviors, and (4) monitoring and feedback processing. Based on this conceptualization of career self-management, we discuss how practitioners can assist clients in this process across different action regulation phases of career self-management.
Keywords: career resources, action regulation, career self-management, career self-management skills
