What do you do when your career script runs out? How older workers decide whether and how to sustain their careers

Abstract

This article explores executive career decision-making at the later career stages, against a background of precarious employment and increasing longevity, and the consequent need, and difficulty, for older workers to sustain their careers for longer. We address a gap in the literature on the careers of later stage workers by exploring older executives’ career options and demonstrating how a decision-making unit (DMU) of stakeholders actively participate in choosing between options, and which factors influence their choices. We furthermore highlight the key factors that can determine whether a career is sustainable, and the strategies that can optimize a career that is becoming unsustainable. We interviewed later stage executives and analyzed our interview data from the perspective of distributed decision-making for sustainable careers. We identified a range of decision-makers who contributed to the DMU at different levels for each decision, from proactively to reactively. Furthermore, we identified interacting strategies which could optimize the sustainability of a later stage career: personal, when individuals re-engaged actively with their careers; and contextual, when careers were reinvented by individuals and organizations. We synthesized these findings in a career sustainability matrix, designed to enable later stage workers to identify whether a career is sustainable, and how to extend career sustainability.