The article presents the main types of career and professional growth.
Table of Contents
- What Is a Career?
- Main Types of Career: Professional and Intra-organizational
- Career Types Depending on the Changes That Occur During Career Movement
- Career Types According to the Nature of the Course
What Is a Career?
A career is a process of professional, socio-economic development of a person, expressed in his advancement through the levels of qualifications, statuses, remuneration, and the positions occupied at these levels fixed in a certain sequence.
The career concept does not mean an indispensable and constant movement up the organizational hierarchy. It should also be noted that a person’s life outside of work has a significant impact on the career and is part of it.
In other words, a career is an individually conscious position and behavior associated with work experience and activities throughout a person’s working life.
Read also post “What Is a Career, Career Growth and Professional Promotion: Meaning, Differences.”
The versatility and complexity of the process of career growth and, in general, a career is reflected in the diversity of its types.
There are many different features and criteria for classifying career types. In addition, there are several principal trajectories of a person’s movement within a profession or organization that will lead to different types of careers.
Main Types of Career: Professional and Intra-organizational
According to the environment, careers are traditionally divided into professional and intra-organizational.
A professional career is characterized by the fact that an employee goes through various stages of development in the course of his professional activity:
- education,
- employment,
- professional growth,
- support for individual abilities,
- retirement.
An employee can go through these stages sequentially in different organizations.
Intra-organizational career covers a successive change in the stages of employee development within the same organization.
This type of career is implemented in three main directions:
- Vertical. The concept of a career is often associated with this direction since in this case career advancement is the most visible. The vertical career direction refers to the rise to a higher level of the structural hierarchy.
- Horizontal direction. It is a move to another functional area of activity or the performance of a service role at a stage that does not have a rigid formal fixation in the organizational structure (for example, fulfilling the job duties of the head of a temporary target group). A horizontal career can also include the expansion or complication of tasks within the position held.
- Centripetal. This direction is the least obvious, although in many cases it is very attractive for employees. Centripetal career refers to the movement towards the core or leadership of the organization. For example, inviting an employee to meetings that were previously inaccessible to him, to formal and informal meetings, confidential appeals, and individual important assignments from management.
Career Types Depending on the Changes That Occur During Career Movement
Types of careers depending on the changes that occur during career movement:
- High-powered careers (growing influence).
- Qualification growth.
- Status growth.
- Financial growth.
A high-powered career is associated with the formal growth of influence in the organization by moving up the management hierarchy or with the growth of the informal authority of the employee in the organization.
Qualification growth involves professional promotion, and movement through the categories of the tariff scale of a particular profession.
Status growth is an increase in the status of an employee in an organization, which is manifested in the assignment of the next rank for long service or an honorary title for an outstanding contribution to the development of the company.
Financial growth is an increase in the level of employee remuneration, namely, financial reward, the size and quality of social benefits provided to him.
Career Types According to the Nature of the Course
According to the nature of the course, linear and non-linear types of careers are distinguished.
With the linear type, career development occurs evenly and continuously, while the non-linear type is career movement in jumps or breakthroughs.
As a special case, one more type can be distinguished. It is stagnation (dead end), as a stage of the absence of any significant changes in a career.
By Degree of Sustainability and Continuity
According to the degree of stability and continuity, career growth is divided into stable and unstable, intermittent and continuous.
Read post “Six Main Stages of Career Development.”
Career Development Types By Possible Implementation
Career can be:
- potential – a labor life path built by a person based on his plans, needs, abilities, and goals;
- real – what has been achieved over a certain period.
By Speed and Sequence
According to the speed and sequence of passing the steps of the career ladder, careers are distinguished:
- high-speed,
- normal,
- adventurous,
- super adventurous,
- typical,
- consistent,
- crisis.
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