Career Adaptability | Encyclopedia

Career adaptability originated from the core concept of Super’s career development theory, namely career maturity, which has been constantly updated and revised by researchers (Super & Knasel, 1981) [1]. Some experts proposed “career adaptability” instead of “career maturity” after 1981 (Super & Knasel, 1981; Savickas, 1997) . The concept of career adaptability was first proposed by Super, which evolved from another core concept of career development, career maturity. Career adaptability refers to the ability of individuals to adapt to changes smoothly and maintain the balance of their career roles when coping with the transition of their own career roles (Super & Knasel, 1981) . As the work world shifts from stable to fluid, how individuals can improve their career resilience to cope with unpredictable situations and make appropriate adjustments has been explored (Savickas, 1997; Savickas, 2005) . Simply put, career adaptability are the resources that can successfully manage individuals’ current and anticipated career transitions (Savickas, 1997; Savickas, 2005) . These resources are not the core characteristics of the individual, but exist as a meeting point between humans and the environment, so they are psychosocial (Samuel, 2015) . As an adaptive resource, career adaptability is a self-regulatory ability that one can use to solve unfamiliar, complex, and ill-defined problems arising from developmental career tasks, career transitions, and job trauma (Tolentino et al., 2014) . Career adaptability enables individuals to broaden, improve, and ultimately realize self-concept in professional roles, thus creating a working life, bettering life satisfaction, and building a career framework (Porfeli & Savickas, 2012; Ginevra et al., 2018; Ginevra et al., 2017) . With the rapid development of society and technology, personal adaptability is becoming more and more important. Learning how to adapt to a changing world is becoming one of the necessary conditions for success. Career adaptability can help individuals to smoothly adapt to changes when coping with their career roles, and maintain their ability to balance their career roles, which will affect their important psychological resources for career development and achieve more meaning in life. In recent years, career adaptability has gradually attracted the attention of researchers. Therefore, in order to explore the main factors, such as research focus, the main researchers, its evolution, and the important results of career adaptability in the last ten years, this study used the scientific knowledge mapping software CiteSpace as a research tool, and select related articles from the Web of Science between 2010 to 2020 under the theme of “career adaptability” for data analysis, which can help future researchers to understand current and future career adaptability research and control the research direction of career adaptability. The results of this research indicate that there are direct or indirect connections between different themes, such as the career adaptability scale, career construction, positive personalities, and so on, but few articles integrate multiple research topics. At the same time, the main researchers, research frontiers and network relationships were also obtained. Based on the above findings, the correlative main concept, theoretical structure, evolution, and research progress of career adaptability in the past ten years are discussed.