‘No regrets, they don't work’: Utilizing repair strategies to embrace difficulties in individuals' careers

As scholarly interest in the impact of career difficulties like career setbacks grows, research increasingly aims to understand how individuals navigate these difficulties. To explore how individuals handle them and prevent career regret, we conducted a qualitative investigation with a total sample of 109 participants. Our findings reveal that many individuals embraced difficulties in their careers instead of regretting them. We saw that the difference between regretting and embracing these difficulties lies in whether individuals employ repair strategies: embracing difficulties was possible through repair, whereas failing to engage in repair led them to feel a sense of regret about the difficulty. We identified three repair strategies—reclaiming (i.e., realigning career with personal values or restoring measurable, tangible conditions), enriching (i.e., adding new knowledge or extending career towards greater fulfilment), and mobilizing (i.e., disrupting the career, or transitioning into a more promising career)—which enable individuals to embrace difficulties. Additionally, our findings revealed that two triggering factors foster engagement with repair, namely, adopting a protean career attitude and exercising courage. Taken together, our findings promote the importance of repair strategies as a crucial response that can alter how people perceive difficulties in their careers and avoid emotions of regret.