Careers in organizations

Posted on May 14, 2024 by Martin Hahn, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.

We have ambivalent feelings toward organizations. We depend on them so much and spend so much time in them that we want them to be simple and benign. Organizations are neither simple nor benign; they are complex and dangerous. Their complexity is demonstrated by the models that have been created to try to conceptualize careers in organizations from a developmental view.

The combined picture that emerges when we look at them together seems to be more of a patchwork than a complete map of a well-known terrain. The fact that it seems like a patchwork because it does not derive primarily from the fact that the models have been created by scholars from different disciplines, starting from different perspectives.

It derives more from the fact that the creators of the models have studied quite different populations. Some have looked only at management trainees, some have looked only at professionals, and some have tried to look at all classes of employees but have tried to look at the entire life span at the same time.

The terrain of careers in organizations is both complex and shifting. It is complex because the individuals who come to the work place are so different from one another in their expectations and skills and because organizations themselves have so many different needs. It is shifting because the nature and training of the work force is changing rapidly at the same time that organizations themselves are changing in response to environmental pressures and new ideas.

The effects that organizations exert on individual development certainly should warn anyone that while the possibilities for individual growth in organizations are great, organizations can be dangerous. They are particularly dangerous if things from organizations cannot deliver.

Too many individuals enter organizations expecting that if they work hard, the organization will take care of them. They do not realize that organizations actually exist only in our own minds and that they are made up of individuals who may not be around to fulfill implied promises at some time in the future.

Organizations are dangerous because too often we have organized the jobs in them according to old models of efficiency without taking into account human needs. They are dangerous when we allow ourselves to think that some specialized knowledge or past achievement will make us secure; technology and organizational needs shift so rapidly that it is only our ability to learn and adapt that prepares us for the future. What are the implications of what we have discussed for individuals, and for organizations? Certainly one of the implications is that “career development specialists” should not try to promise recruits that they will do “career pathing” for them; they should not because they cannot. Any promised path could disappear tomorrow. Specialists cannot do career development for individuals, only individuals can do the hard work, make the choices, develop the relationships, and take the chances that will make the biggest differences in the way their careers develop.

Each individual must take responsibility

For managing his or her career and lt will be shared with everyone in organization life. Individuals should try to clarify for themselves as much as they can about their strengths and interests as well as the opportunities that are currently available. Managers and planners have regular discussions with individuals about job rotation and assignments. There are organizations now attempting to follow both recommendations.

Work has often been designed and managed so that factory and office workers are neither expected nor even allowed to use their problem-solving skills and to work with others to improve output. Partly in response to foreign competition, a number of companies are experimenting with socio-technical work designs to encourage “autonomous work teams” to work together to improve output and quality. Competition demands that designers, marketers, manufacturing people, suppliers, and even customers work together to get a new product into the market in such short periods of time that old ways of organizing and dividing up duties are no longer feasible. What impact are these changes having on the career development and individual development of factory and office workers, on professionals, on supervisors, and on managers? This is not yet known.

Also in response to competition, large organizations have been eliminating levels of middle management and “flattening” their organizations at the same time they have been “downsizing.” In the meantime, enough new jobs have been created by smaller organizations to increase the number of total jobs.

The life-span models of careers were constructed at a time when employees, mostly men, entered the work force early and stayed in the work force until retirement. With large numbers of women entering and leaving the work force at different ages, what are the new patterns that are emerging?

Organizations are going to have to adapt to changes in the environment as rapidly as current trends seem to project, what are the processes that members of those organizations will use to form and reform themselves to perform these ever-changing tasks?

There are many questions related to careers in organizations and much more research will be required to answer these questions.