Proactivity in a Career as a Strategy of the Intentional Construction of an Individual Future in the World Oriented Toward a Global Change

Authors:

• Agnieszka Cybal-Michalska

Abstract

Global transformations of the contemporary world have a multidimensional character. These transformations touch almost all aspects of social existence. They seem inevitable and their complexity is hard to capture. It is really difficult to overestimate the meaning of these changes for the quality of career construction, its course and the modification of its individualized paths. The contemporary study of career makes it necessary to include the multicontextual changes in the world of work, that make employees face new requirements. The most important changes include the increase in the role of career and the ability to plan, manage and monitor one's own career in a lifelong perspective. Studies in the subject of career development in the world of “boundaryless” careers, in the world where “a career makes a career”, emphasize the fact that, there is a shift in responsibility for shaping one's career from an organization to an individual and the basic feature of post-organizational era is the orientation to proactivity (as commitment that results from conditions, needs and contextual circumstances), that becomes the basis for an individual's mobility in a career. It means a specific shift of individual's orientation from external conditions of existence to the internal ones. All of these processes make us consider career as an individual's “property” – an individual as an agent that makes changes in a surrounding reality in the desired direction.