Career Sustainability: Framing the Past to Adapt in the Present for a Sustainable Future

Abstract

The emerging literature concerning sustainable careers posits that career development is an adaptive and dynamic process of creating person–career fit, in pursuit of a career that is happy, healthy, and productive. Our goal is to advance this literature by delving deeper into the intrapersonal processes involved in constructing career sustainability—which involves meeting one’s needs in the present without sacrificing one’s needs in the future—and clarifying the role of time in this process. We articulate a fundamentally subjective, intrapersonal process of enacting career sustainability that draws upon career construction theory, prospective and adaptive sensemaking, conservation of resources theory, and career adaptability to articulate how individuals reflect, frame, envision, re-frame, and ultimately, adapt to effect and maintain their career sustainability over time. This expansion brings added conceptual depth to earlier sustainable careers models by situating the career firmly within the agency of the career actor and articulating how this process unfolds with specific recognition of the past, present, and future. Educators, career counselors, HR representatives, and community organizations are called upon to promote and support career sustainability and support individuals through this dynamic and adaptive process.

1. Introduction

The complexity of modern careers is well documented; careers have become longer, interorganizational, and unpredictable [1,2,3], and the responsibility for career management has shifted from employers to individuals, who must be increasingly self-directed and driven by personal values rather than organizational rewards [4]. However, the rise in dual-career couples, non-traditional families, and increased attention to work–life balance have made career management less independent [5,6]. There is also a greater recognition of career affordances: the privileges and barriers individuals face when developing their options and enacting their careers [7]. The self-directed nature of modern careers suggests that individuals can craft a unique path forward, to ensure their needs are met, within the demands and constraints of their environment [8,9]. This requires individuals to determine precisely what those needs are, what constitutes a “good” career for them, and how to create and maintain person–career fit. Yet, fit is not static—individuals must be future-focused and ensure that their career resources are actively developed, preserved, and renewed. In other words, they must pursue ongoing sustainability in their careers.

The quest for career sustainability has undoubtedly been complicated by the worldwide disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic during the early 2020s. In the two years following the onset of the pandemic, labor markets globally saw devastating job losses, unprecedented turnover, record-low unemployment, and an unexpected widespread move toward remote work arrangements [10,11,12]. This reality, in addition to the pervasive threat of ill-health and mortality, seems to have led many to rethink the roles that their careers play in their lives [13,14]. In this turbulent career environment, the concept of “sustainability” has been applied by careers researchers as a lens through which to view the individual’s ongoing endeavor to develop a meaningful and satisfying career experience.

This burgeoning literature on sustainable careers is predicated on the concept of sustainable development, articulated in the United Nations’ 1987 Brundtland Report as that which “meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” [15] (p. 43). From an organizational perspective, career sustainability involves the creation of jobs and human resource management (HRM) systems that enable the long-term capability of employees—as organizations without capable employees are unlikely to thrive [16,17,18]. In contrast, the individual perspective focuses on how people can manage their own career development and growth, conserving resources and maintaining their career longevity [19,20,21,22]. This application of sustainability principles to the individual lifespan places the onus on the individual as an agentic career actor and recognizes their responsibility and control over their career within and across organizations. If individuals are indeed the agents at the helm of their own careers [8,23,24], then it is critical to understand career sustainability primarily from their perspective. Although research has provided a generalized description of a sustainable career and its elements [21,25], it has not yet clarified how an individual can determine what a sustainable career entails for them, personally [26,27].

In this paper, we approach career sustainability as a potential outcome of an active process on the part of the individual rather than a stable characteristic of a particular career. We thus expand on notions of career sustainability by centering the individual’s perspective and agency, and by exploring the ways that individuals construct their careers through constant framing, re-framing, and adaptive action. Instead of considering sustainable careers from an HR perspective, we write instead from the point of view of a career agent asking questions such as, How does one engage in the process of defining what a sustainable career is, so that one can take action to achieve it?, and outline the theories underlying this intrapersonal process as it unfolds over time. From this perspective, a sustainable career is not ready-made by the organization; rather, it must be a self-made, personal career trajectory. Our paper describes how a person can engage in this self-directed process of outlining and building toward a sustainable career, given their personal context and life circumstances. This process is retrospective (looking to the past) and prospective (envisioning the future), so the career actor can take action in the present toward building and maintaining a sustainable career.

We begin with a review of the existent literature on sustainable careers. As a means of building our contribution, we integrate the phenomena of prospective and adaptive sensemaking [28,29,30,31], career construction and career adaptability [32], and conservation of resources (COR) [33,34] to explore how individuals come to understand the sustainability of their own careers and how they can meaningfully act to preserve or re-establish that sustainability when it is threatened. Drawing on these theories, we articulate a conceptual model outlining an intrapersonal approach to career sustainability that entails an individual’s ongoing construction of a career that meets their needs in the present and in the future. This approach honors one’s past but is ultimately future-focused; through an iterative process of framing the past, envisioning the future, and adapting in the present, individuals can assess the current state of their career, question the sustainability of their current behaviors and trajectory, and take action to align with where they would eventually like to be. We therefore bring added conceptual depth to this emerging and important concept. We conclude with a discussion and directions for future research.

2. Sustainable Careers

The literature regarding sustainable careers emerged from the broader conversation about corporate social responsibility and sustainable development to specifically highlight the impact of business operations on people and employees in particular. Elkington’s [35,36] “Triple Bottom Line” of planet (environment), profits (economic), and people (social) reflects the holistic re-envisioning of socially responsible organizational success and impact through sustainability. The rise of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics, through which companies can report on their broader impact and mitigatory actions [37], has further codified sustainability principles into a corporate accountability framework. Authors such as Docherty et al. [38,39] and Pfeffer [18] called attention to the fact that the intensification of work, coupled with increased precarity (e.g., lack of stable income, unemployment protections, and health and retirement benefits) [40,41,42], were producing a workforce that was increasingly disengaged, ill, unhappy, and unproductive. Ehnert and Harry [17] related the “wasteful” (p. 222) approach to human resources to that of natural and other resources in times of abundance, suggesting that sustainability only becomes attractive when there is a shortage or crisis—that is, long after sustainable practices can have a mitigating impact, resulting in further short-term, desperate measures. As an alternative to this exploitative stance, sustainable HRM strives to craft HR systems that sustain long-term performance and promote the longevity and well-being of the employees themselves, in addition to the standard environmental, economic, and societal dimensions [17]. Advocacy for sustainable work systems and careers aligns with two of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, addressing both the good health and well-being of employed individuals (Goal 3) and the advancement of decent work (Goal 8) [43].

Newman [16] is credited with proposing the concept of sustainable careers, which she defined as “preserving and enhancing human capital rather than depleting it” (p. 138). In particular, she coined this term in reference to older workers and the actions needed to ensure their longevity in the workforce. She argued that organizations should work to preserve their workforce as employees age instead of wastefully treating them as though they are expendable or disposable. Similar to Docherty et al.’s [38,39] sustainable work systems, the foundation of the sustainable career is based on the theory of conservation and renewal of physical resources—in this case, of employees.

The idea of the sustainable career is focused on the dynamic and individualistic nature of modern careers [8]. The sustainable career centers the individual while recognizing the contextual constraints and opportunities that shape a career, all of which change and develop over time [19]. The notion of sustainable careers builds upon several “new” career concepts, such as the boundaryless and protean career. By locating the career within the individual, sustainable careers acknowledge the boundarylessness of contemporary careers that span organizations and occupations [3]. The agency of the career protagonist to direct their vocational behavior and center their own needs aligns with the concept of the protean career, which assigns the individual as the driver of a flexible, value-driven career [44]. The future-oriented outlook of sustainable careers also calls for a focus on developing and maintaining employability rather than just employment [8]. Drawing on the Brundtland definition [15], we suggest that the individual perspective on career sustainability involves meeting one’s own needs in the present without compromising one’s ability to meet one’s future needs.

De Vos and colleagues [19] proposed that a sustainable career involves the ongoing maintenance of fit between the individual and their career over time. De Vos et al. [19] integrated the nascent literature on sustainable careers to create a conceptual model that includes three dimensions: individual, context, and time. At the individual level, this model recognizes the uniqueness across individuals regarding the role career plays in a person’s life and the meaning they derive from it, as well as their ideal outcome, goal, or perception of career success. It is an approach that recognizes career agency as central to conceptualizing careers. With the move to a self-managed or self-directed view of careers, career agency reflects the perceived desire, power, and will of the individual to control their career development, transitions, and experiences [45] (p. 448). An individual’s agency can be enacted in different and personal ways, from proactively seeking out desired opportunities to reacting or adjusting to unforeseen or uncontrollable circumstances to protect one’s employability.

In terms of context, the De Vos et al. [19] model recognizes the importance of the environment within which the self-directed career is enacted. Although the individual is at the center of their career and bears ultimate responsibility, their agency is bounded by their circumstances (e.g., parental status, socioeconomic status), resources (e.g., family wealth, social network), support (e.g., spouse with stable employment), opportunities, barriers, and luck. Thus, the individual career actor evolves in distinct ways based on both personal characteristics and their interaction with their environment. Their model further recognizes the relevance of time and change at all levels: the growth and development of the individual, including their preferences, priorities, responsibilities, and career capital; the evolving nature of the career context, the nature of work, and the labor market; and as the individual and context evolve, the continuous redefinition of the fit between the person and their environment [19].

The De Vos et al. [19] model posits that a sustainable career is reflected in three indicators: happiness, health, and productivity. Happiness represents an individual’s subjective and unique perception of the outcomes of their career activities: an individual’s overall feeling of satisfaction and success with their career within the context of their broader life sphere. Health reflects the “dynamic fit of the career with one’s mental and physical capacities” [19] (p. 4), which includes one’s values, meanings, goals, and needs. Productivity is employability or potential, reflecting one’s engagement and dynamic fit with the career, labor market and/or work environment.

Overall, De Vos et al.’s [19] sustainable career model provides a theoretical foundation for the individual’s attainment of a sustainable career by focusing on the individual’s unique and personal path to success through time, and it includes dynamic and evolving perceptions of success, employability, and fit with the environment. It draws upon the positive psychology literature to describe the purpose, meaning, and satisfaction that a career can provide [25,46]. The model implies a need for self-reflection and self-awareness regarding one’s individual meaning of work and career, an understanding of the context in which one’s career is enacted, as well as the skills and self-efficacy to self-manage one’s career processes [19]. As such, the model provides important insights into the key elements and indicators of a sustainable career.

It does not, however, delve into the intrapsychic processes required to undertake personal reflection and attain awareness of one’s self and one’s environment to achieve a sustainable career. Existent conceptualizations of career sustainability presume that individuals inherently understand or recognize what constitutes sustainable and unsustainable for them, and that they can (perhaps with the support of their organization or other social support) act to mitigate the loss of sustainability in their career. Achieving the person–environment fit necessary to build and maintain a sustainable career requires self-knowledge (including one’s own values and goals), knowledge of one’s environment, as well as knowledge of how both are changing over time. Such conceptualizations seem to suggest that individuals possess the self-knowledge and agency necessary to negotiate the terms of a sustainable career and work to maintain it over time. We contend that the pursuit of sustainability requires the individual to engage in the process of “self-making” [47] to craft an identity and construct their own personal narrative [48]. Self-making requires a level of deep introspection that is not described in existing models of career sustainability.

Below, we propose a model of the introspective, retrospective, and prospective processes in which individuals may engage to answer fundamental questions that support their quest for a sustainable career. We expand on De Vos et al.’s [19] foundational work by unpacking these intrapsychic processes and exploring their implications for the individual pursuit of career sustainability. We focus on the personalized perspective of the career protagonist as they pursue career sustainability. Incorporating the constructivist dimension of the self-concept [48] into the establishment and enactment of career sustainability requires the acknowledgement that (1) the definition of sustainability will vary between individuals; (2) the actions required to establish and maintain career sustainability will depend upon the individual’s understanding of themselves, their environment, and the consequences of their actions; and (3) sustainability is in constant flux and will need to be enacted and re-enacted purposefully over time.

From our perspective, the literature should be expanded to incorporate this third, constructivist dimension. We shift from a view of sustainable careers as a characteristic of the career toward a vision of the career as the outcome of an engaged process on the part of the career actor. Thus, sustainability is not viewed only as a description of a good career, it is viewed also as a continuous act of framing, re-framing, and adapting as one moves through one’s life course. To this end, we integrate three perspectives that underlie intrapersonal career sustainability: the development of a career narrative through Savickas’s [32,47] career construction theory, the framing of sustainability and its maintenance over time through prospective and adaptive sensemaking [29,31], and the enactment of sustainability through the acquisition and protection of key resources and career adaptability [33,34,47]. Together, these theories describe how individuals in the present remember their past experiences to frame the story of how they got to where they are, envision a sustainable future, and make decisions about what they must do to achieve that envisioned future.

3. Career Construction Theory

To understand career sustainability from an individual’s perspective, it is beneficial to ground this understanding in Savickas’ [32,47] career construction theory (CCT). Although it might seem as though modern careers are simply an objective and observable string of jobs that individuals occupy over time, Savickas [32] proposed that careers are more than this; individuals subjectively conceptualize their careers as stories that unfold, complete with plot, struggles and missions, character arcs, and themes, all centering the individual as the main character along this developmental journey of becoming [32,49]. These personal narratives are not mere fictions that serve to rationalize one’s choices; rather, they are encompassing perspectives of the self that guide personal identity, sensemaking, and action [50]. Thus, rather than understanding their working years as an idiosyncratic series of disconnected events, Savickas [32] argued that individuals mentally construct their careers as a comprehensive, purposeful, and meaningful gestalt through storytelling. In career construction, individuals narrate their careers retrospectively and semi-fictitiously, omitting certain facts and remembering others in a manner that preserves continuity and prioritizes rationality on their part as the agent [51]. According to CCT, when individuals reflect upon the decisions that shaped their career direction, they see themselves as carrying the story of their lives forward in an agentic manner—they narrate themselves as purposely moving from their current state toward a desired future state [51,52]. The subjective career narrative is, to the individual, the reality upon which they base present and future decisions.

Importantly, CCT not only reflects the agency of the career protagonist but also has the potential to reinforce and enhance that agency. This selective remembering of the past, particularly when conducted with trained career counselors, can help individuals to reframe their past challenges and career traumas as obstacles that they have overcome, and to better understand why they made the past decisions that they did [32,47], as opposed to (for example) seeing themselves as victims of harsh circumstances. When considering possible future actions, this career narrative provides a frame for future decision making that is meaningful, regardless of its factual accuracy [53]. When constructing the career narrative, individuals weave their career around the vicissitudes of their own lives rather than fitting their lives into a standardized, generic prescription [47,50]. Thus, when making a choice about their future career path, an individual who is reflecting upon their career narrative will be able to discern what is simply the natural next right step for the protagonist based on all that occurred to get them to this point [51]. Obstacles in the career pathway (e.g., lack of skill) and career traumas (e.g., unexpected termination) require adaptability—the individual must take stock of the resources that they have and devise a solution to the complex and often ambiguous problem(s) that they face [32]. Thus, instead of framing a career decision as one with an objectively right or wrong answer based on what the career demands, storytelling helps the individual to see that this is just a continuation of the narrative so far—that is, the next step in the journey of who they will become [50].

As a simple example, consider a parent who is making career-related decisions to enhance sustainability, who may decline a job offer with a higher salary but a commute time that is twenty minutes longer in one direction. This would result in increased transportation costs, increased childcare costs, and three fewer hours spent with their family each week. Viewing this decision as a prioritization of family rather than as a devaluation of their career suggests that this parent will be more likely to perceive the situation as one that is aligned with their personal goals and values, and therefore, one that is more sustainable.

It is precisely these processes of selective remembering, framing, and using the present and past as a template for the future that we carry forward into our articulation of how individuals understand and act to promote career sustainability. This reflective act of constructing meaning from past experience is grounded in the phenomenon of sensemaking. Not only does sensemaking contribute to our understanding of sustainability through CCT, it can further answer questions about how individuals come to understand both the concept of sustainability and the steps they need to take to arrive at that desired future state.

4. Prospective and Adaptive Sensemaking

Sensemaking is a process of noticing, interpreting, and transforming cues—information, circumstances, or events—into meaningful frameworks that inform future action, especially when a situation is surprising, novel, complex, confusing, or ambiguous [54,55]. It is a dynamic and ongoing process whereby cues from the environment are interpreted and recognized through existing frames of reference, and these frames are then updated over time as meaning is made of the new information [28,56,57]. The sensemaking process is activated when an environmental cue unexpectedly fails to match the frame through which it is being interpreted—the ambiguity incites a need to comprehend what is happening and to determine what actions should be taken as a result [30,54].

Traditionally and predominantly, sensemaking has been described as a retrospective process: pauses in action to make sense of what has (just) occurred, building upon past experiences and understandings [55,57]. A growing body of work further describes how sensemaking can be future oriented, as well [30,54]. Prospective sensemaking is a process through which “people envision a desired or expected future event and then act as if that event has already transpired, thus enabling a ‘retrospective’ interpretation of the imagined event” [58] (p. 623). Future-oriented or prospective sensemaking thus builds on what is currently known about the past and present to project forward and speculate about the future and “answer practical questions such as ‘now what?’” [29] (p. 277).

The essence of prospective sensemaking involves building upon past experiences (through memories), known patterns of action and consequence, and interpretive frames to project the consequences of one’s current actions into the future in order to reason how the outcomes of a decision or behavior might unfold over time [29,54,58]. Scholars have described this process as “future perfect thinking—the process whereby we cognitively cast ourselves into the future, look back upon events as if they had already occurred, and interpret their meaning accordingly” [59] (p. 1718). An individual imagines a vision of their future self as a result of taking a particular action and uses it to understand their present and how they should proceed [59]. Thus, “by imagining some desirable (albeit ill-defined) state” [60] (p. 1229), one can anticipate how one’s current actions might influence one’s future self and environments, as well as what these potential repercussions mean for one today [61]. Yet, the present is only the present for an instant, and in the future that is next inhabited, one can reflect upon what was expected and compare this to what actually occurred to see if it matched one’s expectations [62].

Adaptive sensemaking, in turn, describes “the process by which people modify developing understanding so that it incorporates more data and feedback” [31] (p. 612), and seeks to address mismatches between expectations and experiences. As more information is learned over time, and as more experiences are accumulated, understandings of oneself and the social world are interrogated and updated accordingly to mitigate discrepancies [28,56].

Through these “interrelated cycles of retrospection” [30] (p. 711) and “repeated cycles of adaptive sensemaking” [31] (p. 620), the past is used to understand what the future might look like until the future becomes the present and the new reality can be compared with the anticipated future. If discrepancies are found between the anticipated future and the new reality, expectations or behaviors can be adjusted, and the process begins anew [62]. Through this iterative process, prospective sensemaking “seeks to create reality” [29] (p. 282), with adaptive sensemaking used along the way to detect and interpret personal and contextual changes that necessitate new understandings and actions [28] to keep that desired reality achievable.

For example, an individual who trained to be an accountant and secured their dream job at a large accounting firm realizes that they have an unfulfilled need to connect with others. As such, they choose to shift their career first to working in a smaller firm, and then eventually, to leading a team in a non-profit organization.

As we will argue further below, maintaining the sustainability of a system requires us to project forward into the future to understand what actions we need to take in the present to ensure we still leave resources available for those in the future who may need them (including ourselves). Because the future cannot be perfectly known, it is integral to make reasoned predictions about a desired “future perfect” and to act in a manner that we believe will get us to that point, with our beliefs about the necessary actions grounded in our past experiences and interpretive frames [63] (p. 199). As time progresses, we can then make sense of what has happened and whether we are on the appropriate path; the desired future state or the present context might have since changed, or our prior efforts might have been insufficient, and we may need to cognitively reorient ourselves [31,61,62,64]. It is not until the future eventually becomes the present that we will know whether we have achieved sustainability.

Moreover, sensemaking is essential for understanding the modern notion of careers through CCT [50,52]. CCT proposes that individuals construct an agentic vision of themselves that they enact through their careers [32,47]. Savickas [65] notes that “in telling their [career] stories, [individuals] are remembering the past in a way that constructs a possible future” (p. 87). Thus, when they make decisions about what direction their careers should take, individuals see themselves as acting out a storyline that they imagine unfolding in a particular way [47]. Prospective and adaptive sensemaking can, therefore, help us to understand the cognitive process through which individuals shape the direction of their careers so they progress in a sustainable manner.

The facets of CCT and sensemaking described above establish understanding as a groundwork for action, although they do not themselves specify what adaptive actions individuals take or how to ensure that one’s career is and remains sustainable. Career-specific resources, including and especially career adaptability, are required to act out that envisioned future.

5. Conservation of Resources and Career Adaptability

Building career sustainability and adapting to maintain that sustainability over time require the acquisition and protection of key resources and competencies to improve career adaptability. Conservation of resources theory [33,34] and career adaptability [47] highlight essential resources that are needed to maintain career sustainability.

While the sustainable HRM literature focuses on employees as human resources whose capacity the organization must support over time to ensure its own sustainability [18], it is also the case that those employees have resources of their own that act as a foundation for their personal career sustainability [19]. Conservation of resources theory (COR) [33,34] is a stress model that asserts individuals have a limited collection of resources that they strive to protect, and threat or loss of those resources leads to stress. According to COR, during stressful periods, individuals strive to retain and protect their resources, which include objects (e.g., adequate shelter, reliable car), conditions (e.g., stable employment, collaborative marriage), personal characteristics (e.g., optimism, stamina), and energies (e.g., time to work, job-related knowledge) [33,34]. During times of low stress, individuals strive to replenish lost resources, protect and foster remaining resources, and obtain alternative resources that can protect them against net loss in the future [66]. Career obstacles and traumas may be perceived as stressful because they require a significant investment of resources (e.g., unpaid job training to counteract deskilling) or threaten to deplete resources (e.g., loss of income or financial stability).

When applied to career sustainability, COR supports the notion that individuals with more resources (e.g., dual- or high-income, egalitarian household members with strong family and community support) are likely to have a relatively easier time achieving and maintaining sustainability because in times of stress, they have a deep well of resources that can buffer against negative sequelae [66]. Alternatively, those with few resources are at higher risk of a loss spiral, leaving them more vulnerable to a state of career unsustainability while they attempt to recuperate lost resources [34]. For instance, a parent who lacks reliable childcare might lose wages due to absence, might eventually lose their job due to their absence (i.e., loss spiral), and might need to work multiple low-paid hourly wage jobs—perhaps sacrificing sleep, health, and dignity (i.e., an unsustainable career segment)—until a new career prospect arises or they can retain more reliable childcare. Maintaining career sustainability, therefore, involves ensuring that an individual has or can acquire, and can protect, the resources they need to sustain them through the tumult of future career stressors, without significantly threatening the resources they possess in the present. Moreover, career sustainability itself can also be considered a resource, a condition that is sought after and protected.

Of the resources needed to support career sustainability, career adaptability is a valuable personal characteristic. Career adaptability is a future-focused “psychosocial construct that denotes an individual’s readiness and resources for coping with current and imminent vocational developmental tasks, occupational transitions, and personal traumas” [32] (p. 56). Adaptability, a facet of CCT, is the means through which individuals apply their resources to resolve current and future career-related dilemmas [32], such as unsustainability.

Savickas [32] outlines four dimensions of career adaptability: concern, control, curiosity, and confidence. Career concern takes a future-oriented perspective, within which the individual is aware that they must consider the future, be involved in the careful planning of their future, and be prepared for obstacles that might arise. Individuals with strong concern connect their present actions to their desired future selves and are therefore motivated to act and thereby effect those positive outcomes. Career control is the perception that one is indeed the agent in charge of one’s career. Although individuals with high career control might consult others, they fundamentally understand that they have the autonomy to make their own choices, and they wield this power assertively and decisively, even when their options are limited. Career curiosity is an inquisitive and reflexive orientation that leads individuals to question the fit between themselves and their current situation and to explore the world of work more broadly. Curiosity is what allows individuals to gain the information they need about their career, possible careers, and their environment, and to make strong decisions when opportunity strikes. Finally, career confidence is the belief that one is capable of successful action when facing a challenge or obstacle. Those with strong career confidence tend to be more persistent, diligent, and willing to work hard to achieve desired outcomes, even if the actions themselves are challenging.

On the other hand, for example, when considering career sustainability, those with low career concern are unlikely to recognize that they are on an unsustainable path. A low sense of control might lead individuals to be indecisive about what actions to take when they must adapt to maintain their sustainability rather than acting authoritatively, and they may dismiss or fail to act on opportunities. Those with low curiosity might be more likely to follow societal norms (e.g., work in a gender-typed career), even if it hinders their career sustainability. In turn, those lacking in confidence may not invest the effort needed to develop and keep up with their field over time.

To enact career sustainability, therefore, individuals benefit from an abundance of resources. Moreover, one resource in particular—career adaptability—can help them understand the need to deploy resources they have, acquire resources they need but do not currently have, and discern when and how to deploy those resources to guard against threats to their career sustainability when they arise. Individuals who purposefully work to assemble the required resources (or enhance those already in their possession) are arguably in a stronger position both to identify when their career is (un)sustainable and to act appropriately when action must be taken.

6. Career Sustainability: An Intrapersonal Model

We integrate prospective and adaptive sensemaking [28,29,30,31], career construction and career adaptability [32], and conservation of resources (COR) [33,34] to present a conceptual model outlining an intrapersonal approach to career sustainability as an individual’s ongoing construction and maintenance of a career that meets their own needs in the present without compromising their ability to meet their needs in the future. In essence, we unpack the intrapersonal processes that determine how one constructs and maintains career sustainability by framing the past and adapting in the present with an eye to the future. We contend that the ability to construct career sustainability in one’s own career requires an adaptive process of sensemaking about one’s career story, what constitutes sustainability, and how sustainability can be achieved. Resources are foundational to the building and maintenance of career sustainability, and adaptability may also be needed to acquire or compensate for missing resources. In our proposed intrapersonal model of career sustainability (presented in Figure 1), we outline the overlapping time perspectives of past, present, and future, as well as the interrelated elements that contribute to an ongoing establishment and enactment of career sustainability. We incorporate De Vos et al.’s [19] view of career sustainability as a dynamic process, which is represented in our model as an ongoing cycle of sensemaking and adaptation, shown as overlapping circles in Figure 1.

6.1. Defining Career Sustainability in Personal Terms

For an individual to be able to enact career sustainability in the present and envision maintaining that sustainability in the future, they must first understand what sustainability means to them. This can be challenging, as the term sustainability itself is relatively ambiguous, particularly when applied to careers, which are also abstract. The process of defining career sustainability, which is unique for each individual, is an act of sensemaking.

Indeed, career experiences, patterns, goals, and expectations are highly individualized, and therefore, they are likely to be heterogenous across individuals [8,67]. Different individuals will have unique perspectives on how to derive meaning from a career—perhaps it is accolades, perhaps it is security, perhaps it is the ability to shape future minds, perhaps it is working in alignment with one’s values. These examples of meaning are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive; rather, they represent a range of meanings that one might derive from one’s career, and by extension, a range of meanings around which one might center one’s understanding of career sustainability.

De Vos et al. [19] posit that happiness (e.g., life satisfaction, purpose), health (e.g., physical and psychological well-being), and productivity (e.g., performance, employability, career development) are leading indicators of sustainability. Yet, happiness, health, and productivity are themselves constructs that each individual may conceptualize differently based on their personal experiences and circumstances.

An individual’s frame for understanding these constructs is shaped through social construction—a social process that builds understanding, much like sensemaking. Throughout life, one’s interpersonal interactions and environment will provide them with a frame to understand what happiness, health, and productivity mean to them [68]. For instance, some might derive happiness from being part of a collective and the ability to spend time with family, whereas others might derive happiness from intellectual achievement, even at the expense of their social lives. Alternatively, there might be great differences in conceptions of health and productivity between an individual with a chronic illness and their able-bodied peer. Finally, one’s life circumstances might change throughout one’s career, such that happiness, health, and productivity at one point in time might look very different as time progresses; they are dynamic and changing targets that will shift as the individual experiences more and as their context changes. To prioritize an individual’s own happiness, health, and productivity, it is imperative that an individual first work to understand what this would mean to them, both now and in the future.

Yet, a personal understanding of career sustainability does not automatically imply that one will desire a sustainable career nor that they will inherently know how to direct their careers in a sustainable manner or even whether they are doing so already. To understand how an individual who wishes to make their career sustainable goes about doing so, we argue that they must have a reasonable understanding of their self-concept, the meaning of work in their life, and their context, alongside prospective and adaptive sensemaking, resources, and adaptability. The individual first needs to know what happiness, health, and productivity mean to them before they can act and adapt to affect those states, both in the present and future.

6.2. The Process of Enacting Career Sustainability

De Vos et al.’s [19] sustainable career model is predicated on the notion of dynamic person–career fit, although it does not specify how such fit should be contextualized. Although the sustainable HRM literature presumes that both the person and the career can be viewed from an objective, third-party perspective, our view of career sustainability is predicated on the assumption that the career is the (sole) “property of the individual” [69] (p. 107). From a career construction perspective, it is imperative to assign primacy to the career protagonist’s perceptions. For an individual to consider their career to be sustainable, we argue, they must perceive benefits that are personally meaningful and work to maintain those benefits within their current context, regardless of the benefits of their career to their current employer. Thus, an individual seeking to enact career sustainability must know who they are and what they want within the context in which they find themselves.

6.2.1. Who Am I and Who Do I Want to Be? Self-Concept

A strong legacy of career theory connects the career to the self-concept, with Super [70] positioning a career as the implementation of one’s self-concept [32,49,71]. The self-concept is the product of an individual’s reflection about who they are physically, socially, morally, and spiritually [72], and it fundamentally answers the question, “Who am I?” [73]. The self-concept is founded on self-schemas, the cognitive frames that we use to interpret and organize information about ourselves that we reflect and see reflected in our social environments [74]. Self-schemas, and by extension, self-concepts, are founded and updated through experiences and social interactions, and through reflections on these, as one develops through life [74,75]. The self-concept is predicted to shape educational decisions and, later, career decisions, as individuals decide which paths to take [49,76]. Indeed, career counselors recommend grounding career decisions in the self-concept to the greatest extent possible, as this can provide an anchor for the character arc in one’s career narrative [47]. Therefore, when key career decisions must be made (e.g., to support career sustainability), the logical choice is simply the one that would be the natural next step for the protagonist of the career narrative [50].

6.2.2. What Do I Want and What Will I Want? Personal Meaning

Career sustainability requires a clear sense of individual meaning, which centers on the intrinsic benefits that a career can bring a person, including esteem and belongingness. Van der Heijden and De Vos [8] argue that sustainability arises from mutually beneficial interactions for the person and their organization. We propose a broader conceptualization of sustainability, which involves the mutual benefits that a career provides for both the person and their social environment. For example, individuals in caring professions might gain meaning through helping other community members, whereas innovators might gain meaning from bringing new ideas to life. Meaning may also be gained through a career that engenders and enriches one’s personal life. In all these cases, others in the environment stand to benefit from these careers and their actors, as well.

6.2.3. How Do I Get There? Constructing and Maintaining Career Sustainability

To construct and maintain career sustainability, one must make sense of their self-concept, their context, and the meaning of their career. We argue that one engages in a perpetual process of examining these elements retrospectively and prospectively so one can take adaptive action in the present. Sensemaking happens in the present, but with a view to the past (i.e., framing) and a vision of the future (i.e., envisioning). In other words, careers are shaped by the past, as framed and understood in the present, with action taken in the present to adapt in the pursuit of envisioned goals for the future. The individual answers the question “Who am I?” by framing information from their past, such as their educational and work experiences, personal history, the skills they acquired and demonstrated in the past, and any privilege or oppression they perceive, into a personal narrative or “career story” [32]. This story allows the individual to assess career sustainability in the past by answering the following questions: Was I happy? Was I healthy? Was I productive? What does it mean to be happy, healthy, and productive?

They also engage in envisioning their future, seeking to write the next chapter of their career story by setting personal and career goals, developing expectations about the future, and identifying opportunities to move toward their desired future state. Indeed, certain accounts of career-oriented decision making demonstrate that individuals speculate about the future and consider whether the choice they are about to make will lead them to a desirable future state [77]. Envisioning future career sustainability requires the individual to answer the following questions: How can I be happy? How can I be healthy? How can I be productive? The answers to these questions enable the individual to take action in the present to “correct their course” if they perceive that they are not headed in the desired direction. When an individual engages in prospective sensemaking, they imagine a desirable future state and use it as a template to build schemas for current action, thereby structuring the steps they need to take to move from the present to that desired (yet hypothetical) future self [29,30]. Importantly, this desirable state and these schemas are built upon retrospective reflections about how their world has been so far, and these experiences tell them about what they should want from the future and what they will need to do to get there [29]. Individuals then build toward this projected future self, with the desirable state and the schemas planned to bring them there used as frames that filter and influence the interpretation of incoming cues [30].

In the present, the individual engages in adaptive thought and action in response to the career story they developed by framing the past. Konlechner et al. [30] assert that discrepancies between past experiences and expected outcomes are perceptible and can lead to negative emotions (e.g., pessimism, frustration) that form the basis for action. Reflection on career sustainability requires the individual to ask: Am I happy now? Am I healthy now? Am I productive now? If the answer is no, the individual has the opportunity to take action by making decisions that will align their current conditions with the narrative of their career story, by building competencies that address perceived gaps, and by acquiring resources that will enable them to advance toward their goals. Prospective and adaptive sensemaking and the acknowledged goal of sustainability take this speculation about the future one step further.

Importantly, warning cues that contraindicate the continued viability of the expected future state can go unnoticed [30,78]. When this happens, the individual may unknowingly continue with their plan of action, not realizing that it will no longer bring them to their desired future state. Konlechner et al. [30] proposed that this disparity between expectation and experience will eventually be identified, but only once the disparity between the current and expected future states becomes too great or has lingered too long to be ignored anymore. The warning signs of a lingering or growing disparity might not be detected in time to update the frame and correct the action plan accordingly to ensure that the individual still arrives close to their desired future. For instance, with regard to the person themselves, low levels of career adaptability, and particularly low concern, might lead them to misperceive or not to recognize cues warning that career sustainability is under threat. Alternatively, in terms of external circumstances that threaten career sustainability (e.g., advancements in robotics), COR supports that when a disparity is not an imminent threat to a valued resource, the individual might be less likely to notice the situation since it is not stressful in the moment, or to expend resources to take immediate action, given an inherent orientation toward resource conservation [66]. Finally, one might continue operating on the assumption that one’s ideals of happiness, health, and productivity are the same despite personal or contextual changes (small or large), leading to a failure to notice a growing disparity between one’s present state and a sustainable future as one continues the status quo.

This process of sensemaking is complex and iterative, as each element is highly dynamic and not within the complete control of the individual. Self-concept can change positively as the individual acquires training and work experience or negatively if they face disappointments. Contextual changes might include new relationship experiences, such as parenthood or eldercare, the shift to virtual or hybrid work arrangements, national labor market fluctuations (e.g., recessions), and changes to legislation. With regard to meaning, individuals might lose the ability to engage in their jobs in a way that is meaningful to them due to changes in their personal circumstances (e.g., an illness), their work (e.g., an engineer being promoted to a management position and no longer conducting experiments), or the context (e.g., the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic provoking moral injury among healthcare workers) [79]. Thus, even when the values that define meaningfulness for an individual do not change, their context can lead to a change in the meaningfulness of their career over time.

One’s career context can either contribute to or detract from the development and maintenance of sustainable careers [19]. For instance, at the workgroup, organizational, and societal levels, a culture that mandates and/or valorizes overwork undermines the likelihood of achieving a thriving career without risking emotional exhaustion and burnout [80,81,82]. Alternatively, social protections at the national level affect income security, the social safety net, and recourse available to employees who are mistreated at work [40,41,83], all of which are of fundamental importance to employee agency and well-being at work [42,84]. Family wealth, social and financial support, as well as interdependence of a spouse or other family members can similarly benefit the freedom of choice individuals have when making career decisions [85], thereby providing greater opportunity to enact career sustainability among those who have access to such resources [19,66]. Access to these valuable resources in the past, present, and future may all be facilitated or constrained by one’s environment [66]. Other individual attributes that are learned from family (e.g., values and ideals), or that shape access to certain careers and conditions (e.g., gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability), further demonstrate the ways in which an individual’s context and the legacies they inherit from both close others and society writ large might influence their career beliefs and aspirations, and ultimately, their career sustainability [69].

As we noted at the outset of this paper, career sustainability is not a static state. One does not simply achieve sustainability and maintain it indefinitely without further action, as both individuals and their circumstances change over time. For career sustainability to be maintained, individuals must constantly monitor and reflect on internal and external cues, to identify changes and adapt accordingly. To do so, individuals must first notice and interpret cues signalling that their imagined future self is no longer attainable given the current course of action, and they next must adapt to correct this discrepancy, either by changing their behaviors or adjusting the desired end state. The goal of sustainability, therefore, arguably needs to be the primary frame through which individuals filter cues. If sustainability is given primacy as the dominant frame, then the sensemaking [30,57,86,87,88] and cognitive psychology [89,90,91] literature alike would support that the individual has a much greater chance of recognizing worrisome cues early, interpreting those cues as worrisome, responding accordingly, and consequently, maintaining sustainability over time.

6.3. The Self-Examination Cycle: Retrospection, Introspection, Projection and Prospection

A continuous cycle of retrospection (“Who am I?”), introspection (“What do I want?”), projection (“What will I want?” and “Who will I want to be?”), and prospection (“How will I get there?”) will help to shape the decisions about sustainability over the course of a career (see Figure 1). To ensure that discrepancies between the desired future self and the current self and planned path are minimized, individuals will need to occasionally reflect and reconsider whether these are aligned—in essence, they will need to be concerned about their career sustainability. If there is a misalignment, then adaptations will need to be made to address that discrepancy [31]—that is, they will need to have the control, curiosity, and confidence necessary to either deploy or acquire the resources they need to respond. On the other hand, if this “future perfect” [63] self is aligned with one’s (current) values and goals, then this sets a strong foundation for sustainability—as long as this alignment can be maintained through reflexive cycles and prompt adaptive action is taken to address any ambiguities or discrepancies that begin to develop as the individual and their context change over time. As “identity threat is a powerful prompt for sensemaking” [54] (p. 73), it is reasonable to predict that changes in the self, or changes in the environment that affect the self (present or future), will prompt sensemaking among individuals, the results of which are likely to spur action to address the threat to their identity [31]. As described above, we agree with De Vos et al. [19] that happiness, health, and productivity are three intra-individual indicators that individuals can use as bellwethers of building divergence between expectations and experiences.

7. Discussion

The nascent literature concerning sustainable careers has provided an important contribution to our understanding of what constitutes an optimal career, looking beyond mere productivity to include health and happiness as indicators. In this way, the sustainable careers framework touches upon two important Sustainable Development Goals: good health and well-being and decent work [43]. We have extended this framework by articulating a model of career sustainability from the subjective perspective of the career actor as they live out their career, with a particular focus on specifying the role of time in the process. We therefore emphasize the agency and perspective of the career actor as the creator, owner, interpreter, and narrator of their career. We assign primacy to the career actor’s point of view and the perception that the benefits inherent in a career must be personally relevant and meaningful and sustained over time. We peer deeper into the process of constructing career sustainability, describing the subjective processes through which individuals engage in assessing and creating career sustainability by framing the past, envisioning the future, and taking adaptive action in the present. Given the personal nature of career sustainability, to achieve and maintain it over time, individuals must constantly make an effort to know themselves, the purpose of their engagement with work, and their context. This process involves the individual endeavoring to know what happiness, health, and productivity mean to them as well as being ready to adapt to correct any deficiencies. We propose that it is the continuous cycle of retrospection (“Who am I?”), introspection (“What do I want?”), projection (“What will I want?” and “Who do I want to be?”), and prospection (“How will I get there?”) that guides an individual’s approach to sustainability over the course of a career (see Figure 1).

By drawing upon CCT, sensemaking, and COR, we have described how the enactment of career sustainability requires that individuals remember past experiences to frame their current understanding of their self and their context, construct a career narrative, and envision a future in which they can still be happy, healthy, and productive workers. While the facets of CCT and sensemaking establish understanding of one’s career sustainability, resources and adaptability provide a framework for action to adapt one’s present circumstances to accommodate well-being in the present without obstructing the future. This elaboration explores the dynamism of building a sustainable career as an ongoing and evolving task. The conscious act of constructing career sustainability within an individual’s own life underscores the importance of career actors’ agency, positions careers as constantly unfolding, and highlights the need for individuals to remain vigilant and proactive in establishing and maintaining their career sustainability over time.

7.1. Implications for Practice

Employing a career sustainability frame means that individuals must strive to be self-aware, understand what their career means to them, be aware of their context, and consider the fit between all three. Career sustainability involves constantly (or periodically) reassessing these by monitoring and reflecting on internal and external cues, identifying changes or misalignments, and adapting accordingly. Individuals will need to have the concern, control, curiosity, and confidence necessary to either deploy or acquire the resources they need to re-establish or maintain sustainability over time.

As alluded to briefly above, just because career sustainability is possible, this does not mean that all individuals know it is a possibility, nor how to assess their career sustainability or adapt to achieve and perpetuate career sustainability. The question then becomes how to keep career sustainability at the forefront of an individual’s mind when making career decisions. According to Konlechner et al. [30], sensegiving can play a formative role in developing a “sticky” frame for future expectations. Gioia and Chittipeddi [64] described sensegiving as a process whereby one person or party attempts “to influence the sensemaking and meaning construction of others” (p. 442), directing them toward a preferred frame or view of reality. In past research, sensegiving has commonly been applied when studying organizational change, as workplace leaders attempt to establish a common (preferred) vision for the future among employees, with the purpose of influencing stakeholders’ frames and actions moving forward [64]. In the context of careers, and career sustainability in particular, rather than (or in addition to) organizational leaders sensegiving to promote sustainability frames, educators, career counselors and HR practitioners would be well positioned to shape not only the frame itself but also to remind individuals of the unique nature of careers and to build self-awareness and engage in reflexivity (retrospection, introspection, projection, prospection, and adaptation).

Educators, through their interactions with young people, and especially those teaching career-related courses, are tasked with providing insights into not just types of careers and how to pursue one but also into what careers are. Emphasizing self-awareness and reflexivity, as well as introducing career sustainability-related curricula within secondary schools and post-secondary trade schools, colleges, and universities, would provide a broad basis for enabling students and empowering them to employ agency to pursue career sustainability.

Career counselors, due to the nature of their practice and interactions with clients, are arguably best suited to aid in individuals’ reframing of career pathways with sustainability in mind. Sensegiving is a component of career construction theory, as counselors and clients work collaboratively to co-construct meaning from the career stories individuals share [47]. To promote career sustainability, we argue that constructing sustainability as a theme in an individual’s career narrative could be a supportive solution to career-oriented predicaments that an individual might have. Helping clients to reflect upon the values underlying their careers and then discussing sustainability as a theme with them (via the questions posed in Figure 1) could help counselors support their clients’ understanding of their career narrative to date and provide them with a frame for career decision-making moving forward. Moreover, encouraging individuals not only to reflect on past experiences to construct their career but also to project forward into the future and imagine how they might arrive at where they would eventually like to be, might further promote action toward a sustainable career trajectory.

Although our model takes an individual rather than organizational perspective on career sustainability, organizations may still benefit from having employees who are moving toward career sustainability. HR practitioners can encourage employees to be proactive about addressing their career sustainability within the organizational context. Incorporating activities that introduce reflexivity into onboarding processes could help employees to develop a frame for understanding what sustainability means to them, leaving them better prepared to recognize cues concerning a discrepancy between their expectations and experiences and to understand what it means for their long-term well-being. Establishing programs that serve to address broad sustainability concerns (e.g., opportunities for sabbaticals, flexible work arrangements) [8] is a strong first step toward promoting sustainability across the workforce. Ensuring that touchpoints for discussion about career sustainability occur with regular frequency can also serve to reinforce the importance of (re)examining the sustainability of one’s career trajectory, further emphasizing that the conditions supporting one’s career sustainability do change over time and that deliberate actions to remain on a sustainable career pathway might be needed. If organizations wish to support sustainability more holistically, then it is arguably necessary to empower employees to define what sustainability means to them and to encourage employees to ask for more personalized arrangements to support their longevity.

It would be naïve and idealistic, however, to assume that all individuals have access to career counselors who can promote adopting a sustainability frame, or that they all work in organizations where their longevity is prioritized. Precarious workers and individuals from historically marginalized or underserved groups also deserve to have sustainable careers, even if they have less access to the resources needed to support longevity and less power and/or freedom to make bold career moves to protect their long-term health, happiness, and productivity [41,42,92,93]. Despite this reality, precarious, low-income, and underserved employees must still make career decisions [94], and sensegiving about sustainability might empower them to select the more sustainable alternative available to them whenever possible. Alternatively, sharing information about sustainability, and particularly its function as a possible career theme, might help individuals from less privileged backgrounds to have more confidence in their past career decisions, as discussed above. Having trained career practitioners provide community outreach, perhaps in partnership with community organizations that support underserved groups (e.g., affinity groups for employees with disabilities or new immigrants; union stewards and labor organizers), or within government-subsidized career centers, would be one way of expanding the reach of this sensegiving. Our model provides individuals with questions to ask, so they can take the initiative to engage in these conversations with people in their lives who know them and career influencers, such as mentors, even in the absence of structured career counseling. These conversations can support the processes of retrospection, introspection, projection, and prospection that are described in our model.

Ensuring that the concept of career sustainability reaches community organizations, schools, and popular media can help to prevent the epistemic injustice that would arise from more privileged sections of the workforce having knowledge of sustainability and their less privileged peers going without.

7.2. Directions for Future Research

The nature of our conceptual model requires a depth that cross-sectional and/or quantitative research alone is unlikely to reach. We therefore see the opportunity for longitudinal, mixed-methods research that investigates a number of aspects of our model.

7.2.1. The Accessibility of Career Sustainability

It has been taken as an assumption throughout this paper that there is much individual variability in the amount and type of resources one has or can acquire to support one’s own career sustainability. As we have argued, those with a greater number of personal, social, and societal resources, opportunities, and privileges, and who face far fewer barriers, will be relatively more likely to succeed in developing and maintaining career sustainability, as compared to their underserved and less privileged peers. Empirical research investigating which factors more readily enable access to career sustainability is therefore important, so that scholars and practitioners can work to mend accessibility gaps that are identified. For instance, might building a strong social network help individuals overcome the (potential) career sustainability detriments of low educational attainment? Knowing this (or similar) could add nuance to career counselors’ guidance to clients. Alternatively, the accessibility of career sustainability might have changed in surprising ways throughout the shift toward virtual and hybrid work arrangements as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps these arrangements might counter certain barriers to career sustainability, for example, among those requiring more flexible work arrangements (e.g., people with disabilities) or who commonly face microaggressions in in-person work settings (e.g., transgender individuals undergoing a gender affirmation transition). Further research—for instance, interviews with individuals about the barriers to and facilitators of career sustainability—is needed to identify how the patterns of career sustainability accessibility will shift in the coming decades.

7.2.2. Understanding Sustainability through Social Construction

We have proposed that careers will become unsustainable when they lose their meaningfulness, which is signalled through declines in happiness, health, and productivity. At the same time, we contend that the meanings of happiness, health, and productivity differ between individuals and even within individuals across time. If adaptation in the present is needed to maintain career sustainability, and if recognizing the warning signs of low happiness, health, and productivity is needed to trigger adaptation, then it is imperative to apprehend how these thresholds form and where they lie. More research is needed to determine both how individuals define these constructs in relation to their own lives and careers and how they establish thresholds of “unacceptable” levels of unhappiness, ill-health, or lack of productivity. Importantly, if these thresholds are learned in relation to others, which theory and evidence would support [95], then even if an individual perceives themselves to be similar in happiness, health, and productivity as those around them, they may not take action, even if their ideal is different than those around them perceive. Cultural narratives, such as “working mothers can have it all” and “follow your passion and you will never work a day in your life,” could contribute to a false sense of sustainability when, in reality, individuals might be crumbling under the pressure [96]. To counteract the more nefarious forms of these cultural narratives in the future, we will need to better understand how individuals’ perceptions of sustainability are influenced by those around them (e.g., friends, spouse, coworkers, social media). Using a life-design counseling approach [51,97] to study these questions qualitatively would be of value.

7.2.3. Individual Differences in Sustainable Career Competencies

Beyond individual differences regarding the thresholds of happiness, health, and productivity that likely differ inter- and intra-individually, there is also the possibility that individuals will differ in their ability both to detect when they have breached a dangerous threshold and to take adaptive action. We anticipate that those who are more introspective and self-aware will be more likely to detect problematic changes in their happiness, health, and productivity, although research will be needed to confirm whether these and other factors do, in fact, affect detection and action. We encourage future researchers to investigate the influence of personality, construal level theory, temporal orientation, and self-determination on the recognition of career sustainability and adaptive action at the individual level. Furthermore, we encourage career counselors to build on these findings to understand what strategies can help individuals overcome perceptual and adaptive shortcomings to better establish and maintain their career sustainability in the long term.

7.2.4. Efficacy of Sensegiving Interventions

In relation to the final point mentioned above, we have suggested that sensegiving from career counselors and educators (as well as HR practitioners and career practitioners more broadly) is likely to support individuals in their awareness of career sustainability, and by extension, their motivation and ability to enact career sustainability. Quasi-experimental or action-based research is needed to investigate the efficacy of such sensegiving interventions. In particular, as is the case with most interventions, there is the perpetual threat of an intention–action gap [98], such that individuals might learn about career sustainability and want to strive towards it but lack the information, ability, or ongoing motivation to do so. For sensegiving interventions to be effective, they must be tested on a wide range of individuals (due to the array of individual differences in resources and career trajectories highlighted above) to discern which are most helpful to whom and when they ought to be deployed. Developing best practices for supporting career sustainability and integrating them into practice would be beneficial for career counselors who are intent on improving the working lives of their clients.

8. Conclusions

This paper broadens the lens on the sustainable career literature, taking an intrapersonal, subjective perspective and articulating a dynamic view of career sustainability over time. We place the agency for career sustainability into the hands of the career actor and specify more precisely how the element of time contributes to the process. Creating a sustainable career first necessitates an understanding of what sustainability means to the career actor, personally. We propose that those seeking career sustainability engage in an iterative process of framing the past, envisioning the future, and adapting in the present, which will allow them to evaluate the current state of their careers, question the sustainability of their current behaviors and trajectory, and adjust accordingly to mitigate dissonance between where they are going and where they would eventually like to be. From this perspective, career sustainability is not static or episodic; rather, it is the product of active reflection, framing, envisioning, and adaptation on the part of career actors. To build and maintain a sustainable career, an individual must periodically ask themselves the following questions: What is a sustainable career for me? How can I take action to achieve it? Our model assigns agency to the career actor and highlights how career sustainability largely resides in the eye of the career beholder, thereby casting HR departments, career counselors, and educators in a valued supporting role.

Our model opens the door to interventions that will allow people to reflect on their sustainable career goals and take action to achieve them. We recommend that practitioners—including career counselors, HR representatives, and educators—call attention to the reality that establishing and maintaining career sustainability requires conscious effort. To establish and maintain a sustainable career trajectory, the career agent must become aware of the need to engage in introspection (to understand who they are), retrospection (to understand how they came to be who they are), projection (to understand who they want to be), and prospection (to understand how to get there). Then, action must be taken to set oneself on that trajectory. This process must be repeated deliberately, given that the personal and contextual foundations of a sustainable career change over time. From this perspective, career sustainability is not a singular end state that organizations can arrange for individuals; rather, it is an individual undertaking that requires self-awareness, purpose, resources, and adaptability.