title: How life course turning points influence protean career attitudes and aspirations in later career
Creators: name: Roulston, Jacqueline
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: older workers
subject: late career
subject: extended working lives
subject: life course
subject: turning points
subject: protean career orientation

description: ‘Older workers’ (aged 50+) constitute 30% of the UK workforce and this percentage is estimated to increase to 50% by 2050. Despite the economic necessity of encouraging older workers to extend their working lives for longer and the increased focus of government policies and organisational initiatives to retain workers for longer, early exit for many older workers continues, leading to labour force shortages and an ever-decreasing pool of talent. A review of the extended working lives and careers literatures highlighted the need to expand on the limited research of older workers themselves, to address the current lack of in-depth knowledge and understanding of this groups’ motivations and attitudes to work and careers at a time of increasing complexity in later career stage; where the binary construct of work and retirement has become blurred due to social, technology and economic changes as well as legislative changes removing mandatory pension age. Drawing on a life course theoretical framework, specifically focused on the concepts of agency and turning points; and applying a protean careers lens, a qualitative study utilising life grids within semi-structured interviews explores how life course events across the life history influences the current and future career attitudes and aspirations of 30 professionals and senior managers in the UK who are aged over 45. Findings demonstrate how socially constructed life course events become turning points and how these turning points influence career attitudes and aspirations in the later career. A typology surfaced three late careerist types: Born Proteans, Emerging Proteans and Reflective Planners, which offers an insight into how late careerists can be differentiated by careerist type that is based on protean career orientation and level of life course agency. Findings also suggest that based on these careerist types, government policies and organisational interventions aimed at encouraging extended working lives must recognise and be tailored to suit late careerists by type rather than by chronological age. Additionally, for some careerists, more interventions and career support in mid-career should be offered by managers and employers rather than waiting for careerists to reach a specific age. This thesis makes contributions to the extending working, careers, and life course academic literatures, as well as to the wider organisational studies field. A methodological contribution is made through extending the use of life grids and introducing thematic trajectory analysis, an approach that has been underemployed in organisational studies to date. Secondly a theoretical contribution is made to the new careers’ literature, specifically protean careers, by demonstrating how a protean career orientation may develop over time; and, thirdly an empirical contribution to the life course literature by demonstrating how turning points are socially constructed and offering the novel contribution that certain types of careerists do not recognise events as turning points across the life course. Finally, there is an empirical contribution to the extended working lives literature by furthering our knowledge of ‘older workers’, exploring the diversity of this group and offering an insight into how the attitudes and aspirations of those who are in late career are influenced by life history and turning points rather than chronological age.