A conservation of resources approach to inter-role career transitions

Increased globalization and rapid technological advances have greatly affected how careers are enacted. Many of today's workers are transitioning across the boundaries of occupations, organizations, and countries more frequently than previous generations of workers. Despite these great changes in the contemporary workplace, relatively little recent academic consideration has been devoted to the career transition (CT) construct or the commonalities in the decision-making process used by individuals to determine whether to make a CT. Given the many significant changes that have affected careers over the last several decades, the purpose of this paper is to offer a contemporary typology of CTs, a theory-driven model of the voluntary inter-role CT decision-making process, and propositions for future research. The proposed typology and model should also help people make better decisions about CTs.