FREE online courses on Career Paths WBT - Career Paths for Managers - Women's career decisions   The mangers in this research tended to use individual definitions of career and to emphasize the domestic aspects of their lives. The majority of the managers who collaborated with the researchers were men, and the three women interviewed in depth appeared to emphasize similar aspects of career but in addition stressed their concern for recognition of their contribution by senior colleagues. Interestingly, it was found that more women managers identified “career achievement” as being of primary importance over and above “family and personal relationships” when making career decisions, as compared to men managers. The three women interviewed had started adult working life with substantially different employment ambitions when compared with the men. They now appeared to be more concerned with balance; in the sense we describe it here. They considered career achievement to be something associated with how expertly they dealt with the competing demands of their jobs in the context of other domestic and personal aspects of their lives. Clearly, research needs to focus on differences between men and women in terms that take into consideration the changes occurring in women's roles in work and society.

 

It is believed that male managers, by changing the basis of their career decisions, are becoming more concerned with the impact that their employment decisions will have on their personal and domestic circumstances. We could not establish whether this is a function of a societal change in values which has taken place over the last 15 years or whether this is a function of the perceptions of this particular group of managers. However, what is clear is that these findings may not account fully for the experience or decisions of women managers.

 

Conclusions

 

This research shows that there has been a clear shift in the way that managers address issues concerning the management of their careers in the light of the experience they have gained through work over the past 15 years. Here is the evidence to show this:

• Personal, domestic and employment critical events create situations that lead to re-appraisals of decisions made with regard to career development.
• There are individual differences in terms of responses made to unpredictable critical events that can occur during the course of a career.
• Career decisions made by this group of managers strive to maintain a form of balance between the personal, the domestic and the employment aspects of an individual's life.
• Responsibility for career development is beginning to be recognized, as the responsibility of the individual manager and not of organizations, but this shift is dependent on how individuals define career and on whether or not they have experienced critical employment events.

 

There are significant implications from this study for the individual. The majority of people define themselves both internally and externally in terms of their occupation or employment. As the changes identified in this study become better recognized by those who are affected by them, these self-definitions will rely less upon the description of the individuals' employment and will become more rooted in terms that identify the individual's lifestyle. It is suggested that finding that definition may do much to enable the individual come to terms with the more labile conditions surrounding any particular employment. Not being tied to a definition of self that is anchored in an occupation or with a specific employer may enable the individual to come to terms with the volatility of the labor market. As a result, redundancy and re-structuring where a post is lost, no longer strikes at the heart of an individual's definition of himself or herself.