Career adaptability has emerged as a critical psychological resource for university students navigating an increasingly complex, dynamic, and unpredictable labour market. Considering post-pandemic challenges and accelerating digital transformation, the higher education sector has seen a surge in scholarly interest in career adaptability. This study aims to examine the factors associated with career adaptability within the context of higher education in Asia. By adopting a systematic and bibliometric approach, the study seeks to map influential themes, emerging constructs, and evolving research patterns to guide future scholarly inquiry and practice. A total of 52 peer-reviewed publications were analysed using the “Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA)” protocol, and science mapping techniques (including keyword co-occurrence and thematic clustering) were employed to examine the field's breadth and structure. Despite growing interest, the review identified several gaps. This review offers a comprehensive conceptual overview of career adaptability in higher education.
Sustainable careers require happiness, health, and productivity to be considered jointly, yet little is known about how these indicators combine within workers. Using fuzzy clustering, we examined sustainable-career profiles among 1,330 Colombian workers and compared them on perceived external employability and wage. Seven of eight theoretically plausible profiles emerged: sustainable, happy–productive, happy–healthy, productive, happy, healthy, and non-sustainable. The sustainable profile showed the most consistently favorable outcomes, reporting higher employability than all profiles except the happy–productive profile and higher wages than the single-indicator and non-sustainable profiles, but not the partially sustainable profiles. The partially sustainable profiles did not consistently outperform single-indicator profiles. These findings support a configurational understanding of career sustainability while showing that favorable indicators do not operate as a simple additive hierarchy. Career sustainability depends on the pattern in which happiness, health, and productivity coexist within workers and contexts.
The present study aims to investigate the role of perceived job insecurity and psychological capital in determining the job satisfaction and wellbeing of employees in India. The study also investigates the moderating role of intolerance of uncertainty and digital organisational culture. Grounded on Conservation of Resources (COR) and Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) theories, the study collected data from 420 employees in India and structural equation modelling was performed to analyse the data. The study found significant and direct negative relationships of perceived job insecurity with job satisfaction, wellbeing and psychological capital. The study also found the mediating relationship of psychological capital in the associations of perceived job insecurity with job satisfaction and wellbeing. The moderating roles of intolerance of uncertainty found significant, implying the intolerance of uncertainty strengthen the negative relationship between perceived job insecurity and psychological capital. Likewise, the digital organisational culture also found to be positively moderating the relationships of psychological capital with job satisfaction and wellbeing, implying digital organisational culture enhances the positive relationships of psychological capital with job satisfaction and wellbeing. The study stands among the pioneers that explores the role of psychological capital and wellbeing in perceived job insecurity of employees in a developing country context.
This paper analyzes relationships between job demands, job and personal resources, and how they impact exhaustion, engagement, job crafting, and basic psychological need satisfaction. Data collection for this study involved surveys of 221 professionals. The results indicated that AI-related job demands do not directly lead to exhaustion, but effective use of AI increases work engagement. System resources only indirectly influence engagement and exhaustion through job crafting and engagement. Engagement reduces exhaustion and increases job crafting, while exhaustion hinders it. AI-induced crafting fulfills the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. However, high AI demands weaken the positive impact of resources on engagement.
In consideration of sustainable development as a fourth paradigm for twenty-first century careers, our research explored the phenomenon of career uncertainty among young people. We specifically investigated how young people from Italy and Norway appraised career uncertainty and how they coped with it. Eight online focus groups were conducted with a total sample consisting of 52 young people from both countries. Our findings revealed that young people appraised career uncertainty based on different aspects, namely, external and internal factors, career decision-making experiences, and actualization of career aspirations. We also found that young people enacted both future-oriented and present-oriented responses to cope with their career uncertainty. Our study provides implications for the guidance and career counselling of young people to help improve their sense of security and the sustainable development of their careers.
