Developing and validating protean and boundaryless career scale for college passing out students

Abstract

Purpose With changing employment conditions, technological advancement, frequent manpower reduction and global competition, the relevance of the protean and boundaryless career concepts is increasing. With this, the country’s culture plays a pivotal role in career choice. The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate protean and boundaryless career scales for college passing out students and in the Indian context. The protean career scale was measured by self-directed and values-driven dimensions, while the boundaryless career scale was measured by boundaryless mindset and organizational mobility preference. Design/methodology/approach The first step involved defining construct and determining face validity. The data collected via questionnaire from India’s final year engineering students were subjected to exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis in the second and third steps, respectively. Finally, the nomological validity was tested by establishing the relationship between factors influencing career choice and newly developed protean and boundaryless career. Findings The result suggested using a two-factor model with a protean career (combining self-directed and values-driven items) and a boundaryless career as a separate construct for college passing out students. Research limitations/implications The developed scale has nine items that can be used to conduct surveys at the time of campus hiring by academic scholars, HR managers, and practitioners who are working on the identification, development and management of human talent as a part of any human resource management system. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first approach to developing the protean and boundaryless career scale for college passing out students and in the Indian context which can be replicable for South Asian countries.