A world of diverse opportunities – on the need for proactive career capital renewal in the globalizing society

Contemporary discourse on such issues as the quality of the globalizing world providing diverse opportunities, factors determining changes in the social system, and the condition of the human being seeking their place in the reality undergoing permanent change, is one of the most important research orientations. The contemporary social context opens up a wide range of opportunities for individuals to build their own careers. Thus, it seems justified to inquire about the proactivity in the career planning process and to determine whether and how an individual can be prepared to develop, manage, and monitor his/her career to ensure a satisfying experience of oneself and one’s place in the reality of the globalizing world. Contemporary career studies advocate taking into account the process of investing in career capital, the immanent characteristic of which is the subject’s orientation towards proactivity.What becomes an important feature of the individual’s mind is the prospective temporal orientation towards the following: the anticipation of events and their unintended effects, the ability to forecast and plan future actions and to assess the consequences, but above all, the ability to create future desired states of affairs, creating new options of participation and action. Undoubtedly, an important issue that requires inclusion in the course of a person’s life is career development and renewal of career capital. The research on careers means the study of both changes of individuals and changes of organizations, as well as transformations in society. In the discontinuous space-time and heterogeneous system of cultural meanings in the world of global change, career development and the formation of an individual’s own professional identity becomes a cognitive practice based on individual experimentation. The contemporary social configuration in which the search for identity has become a flexible point of reference opens up a range of numerous possibilities for an individual to create his/her own career in the course of life. Continuous development has become an inherent property of career capital renewal. The multiplicity, fragmentation, variability, and complexity, which characterize the organization of social life in the globalizing society, determine changes in the perception of career development and overcoming the tension between the experiences of the past and the possibilities of the future.