Toward a Unifying,Employability-Centric Understanding of Career Sustainability: A Social Cognitive View

Abstract

Career sustainability has become a popular topic of inquiry in the career, educational, organizational, and management literatures. Interest in the topic has been heightened by a confluence of economic, social, political, and technological developments that are affecting many workers and challenging traditional notions of what constitutes a viable career or work path. Career sustainability has been defined and measured in a variety of ways, yielding an active but fragmented research literature. It has been difficult, for example, to reach consensus on whether sustainability refers primarily to employability (obtaining, maintaining, and/or regaining employment) or whether it implies attainment of higher-level outcomes indicative of flourishing. It is possible to conceptualize both employability and flourishing as parts of a larger system of influences, resting on an economic base, that enables or deters career development. Yet employability would appear to represent the more fundamental challenge for many workers. Extending the social cognitive career framework, I focus on the resources and behaviors that may foster (a) employability, (b) preparedness for work instability and transitions, and (c) coping with periods of unemployment. A selective review of findings is presented, along with conceptual models intended to stimulate practice-relevant inquiry.

Keywords

career sustainability employability proactive career behavior social cognitive career theory career self-management

The concept of career sustainability has gained momentum as a target of research on career behavior in recent years (De Vos et al., 2020; Greenhaus et al., 2024). There are many reasons for its topicality, not the least of which is the inclusion of sustainable economic growth and productive employment within the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (UN, 2015) and the broader sustainability discourse that emphasizes resource stewardship, protection against systemic shocks, and long-term solutions. Though the UN goals recognize that human systems and natural environments are interdependent, environmental and career sustainability are not conceptually equivalent. They share a concern with preserving and replenishing resources over time in the face of threat. Yet a career may be sustainable for individuals (e.g., stable, satisfying, economically viable) without being environmentally friendly; conversely, “green careers” are not necessarily free from work precarity. I will use the sustainability metaphor in this article as a heuristic to focus on processes and conditions affecting workers’ livelihoods, apart from their ecological implications.

Historically, careers were often conceptualized in terms of linear progression within a single organization, lending at least the illusion of stability and predictability. Such a model was largely driven by a focus on the experiences of male, middle class workers, ignoring the realities of large segments of the workforce (e.g., many women, lower income, and racial/ethnic minority workers; Fitzgerald & Betz, 1994), the diversity of forms of work (e.g., self-employment, part-time work), and the occasional occurrence of major economic downturns. The late 20th and early 21st centuries have witnessed large scale shifts in many parts of the world toward more dynamic and non-linear career paths, driven largely by technological advancements, globalization, and evolving labor market demands (Hirschi, 2018; Lent, 2018). Where they have occurred these changes have disrupted traditional employment models, leading to the rise of gig economies, freelance work, and short-term contracts, and accentuating concerns about long-term underemployment and work precarity.

Other forces, disruptive and/or progressive in potential, have also been reshaping predominant notions of career stability and well-being. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated the need for adaptability and resilience, as many industries have undergone significant restructuring and workforce reductions. It has also raised the profile of remote or hybrid work, which has made working more convenient for some people, while exacerbating the stress surrounding work for others (by blurring the boundaries between work and non-work life), thereby renewing discussions about work-life balance. The rapid rollout of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in just the past few years represents yet another major, if not existential, challenge to the concept of the traditional, hierarchical, organizationally based career. An era of protean and boundaryless careers, long anticipated, has clearly arrived and settled in (Wiernik & Kostal, 2019).

The pace and sweep of such developments underscore the need to better understand and promote career sustainability as a means of empowering individuals to navigate uncertainty and change in the labor market. Yet a fundamental challenge to the study of career sustainability lies in reaching consensus on how to define it (cf. Greenhaus et al., 2024). What conditions constitute a sustainable career? Is it, for example, a matter of bottom-line economic survival or does it imply something loftier, such as the ability to achieve long-term well-being, fulfillment, meaning, and growth in one’s work life? Or is it something else altogether, such as the ability to demonstrate resilience or adaptability under trying economic conditions? To what extent does it involve systemic (e.g., economic) forces beyond personal agency and one’s proximal context (e.g., social network)? The answers are crucial to how we go about measuring, understanding, and promoting sustainable careers – and preventing or ameliorating unsustainable ones.

The main goal of this article is to consider ways in which we might organize the study of career sustainability so as to clarify its theoretical structure, fortify research efforts and, most importantly, translate this literature into practical efforts to aid people to prepare for and, to the extent possible, maintain viable work lives in the midst of change and uncertainty. The article has four main sections. First, I present a simple hierarchical model that consolidates several elements that appear to varying degrees within existing approaches to career sustainability. This model can be used to envision career sustainability as part of a multi-layered construct, with its various layers more and less tractable to individual-psychological versus systems-economic level interventions. Second, I focus on two of the layers of the model, noting the tensions between defining career sustainability in relation to viable employability alone versus the conditions and outcomes that employability makes possible (e.g., career satisfaction).

Third, highlighting employability as the central challenge of career sustainability, I consider the interplay among behaviors and resources (personal and contextual) that may aid understanding of how students and workers cope with three interrelated developmental or environmental challenges: (a) employability and career growth at, and after, career entry, (b) preparedness for barriers to work stability, and (c) recovery from work disruptions, especially involuntary job loss. This emphasis on career sustaining agency is largely derived from social cognitive career theory (SCCT; Lent et al., 1994), especially its career self-management (CSM) model (Lent & Brown, 2013), as well as the literature on career proactivity (e.g., Parker & Collins, 2010). The fourth and final section of the article suggests directions for further inquiry on career sustainability, both in relation to the social cognitive framework and more generally.

Three caveats are worth noting at the outset. First, my focus will be on paid work, not because I view it as the central or only consequential life role for all people, but simply because the compensation it provides is essential to the economic well-being of most adults, supporting their involvement in other life roles and contributing so substantially to their own and their dependents’ quality of life. Second, I use the term career, as did Super (see Hartung, 2021), to refer to the sequence of jobs people perform throughout their working lives. There is no assumption that only certain forms of work (e.g., highly skilled, full-time jobs) can be a career, that only certain people (e.g., the middle class) can have careers, or that a career consists only of membership in a single occupation or organization from work entry to departure.

Third, though it is useful to consider career sustainability from the perspective of multiple stakeholders (Donald, Van der Heijden, & Manville, 2024), I will prioritize the career development of individual workers over the entirely legitimate yet sometimes competing perspectives of other entities (e.g., managers). This is because organizations do not always hold the well-being of their employees as a central goal (e.g., compared to profitability), making it important for workers to invest in their own career development (Hesketh, 2000). Also, despite notable efforts at cross-disciplinary understanding of career sustainability (Donald, Van der Heijden, & Manville, 2024), different scholarly disciplines often conceptualize target variables and processes in unique ways. While this can ultimately add breadth to the understanding of phenomena that cross disciplinary boundaries, it can also intensify the fragmentation of early-stage inquiry.

Meaning and Structure of Career Sustainability: An Elusive Construct

As a general concept, sustainability refers to the ability of a process, system, or resource to continue over a long period without being depleted or permanently damaged. It is often used to describe conditions that can maintain the integrity of a physical environment but is also used in other contexts, such as economic stability. It ordinarily involves pragmatic solutions to reduce harm or minimize loss rather than to achieve ideal conditions that are impervious to future threat.

Layers of Career Sustainability: A Hierarchical Model

Career sustainability has been approached from a wide array of perspectives, yielding a fertile, though fragmented literature (e.g., see Greenhaus et al., 2024; Matani & Singh, 2025). Figure 1 brings together a number of elements that have been used to conceptualize and study career sustainability across several disciplines. The elements, which are sometimes called by different names, are presented in the form of a multi-layered pyramid – inspired in part by Maslow’s (1943) needs hierarchy – with the lower layers supporting the higher ones. The model does not imply rigid determinism or unfettered growth potential; neither does it assume that workers pursue these aims sequentially or that flourishing is attainable only for vocationally privileged groups. But it does suggest that certain factors (e.g., a booming economy, a strong social network, and impressive work credentials) tend to enable progression up the pyramid. This structure also offers a rough guide to envision where and how psychological interventions can bear fruit – and where other forms of intervention, especially systemic ones, may be more likely to succeed (see the right side of the figure).

Figure 1.

Layers of career sustainability

Economic Substrate

At the base of the pyramid are macro and microeconomic elements, such as prevailing employment rates, government fiscal policies, and safety net programs, that make work more or less viable for persons within a particular nation, locale, or occupation. This level takes into account the larger economic ecosystem within which careers are embedded (Donald, Van der Heijden, & Manville, 2024). Although its influence is not always explicitly noted in discussions of career sustainability, it is the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room. The health of the job market, in particular, either enables or restricts opportunities for sustainability because movement up the pyramid begins with the potential to obtain and retain employment.

Employability Capital

Resting on the economic substrate is what has been variously referred to as mobility or employability capital. Donald, Baruch, and Ashleigh (2024) have listed nine forms of such capital, such as social capital (e.g., access to work-supportive social networks), psychological capital (e.g., self-efficacy), scholastic capital (e.g., educational achievements), market-value capital (e.g., accumulated work experiences, technical and personal skills), health capital (e.g., mental and physical conditions relevant to work potential), and economic capital (e.g., access to material resources that can make certain career options more and less viable). Together, these forms of capital act as filters, shaping which career opportunities are genuinely feasible and either expanding or limiting a person's access to particular work paths.

Employability

Employability capital is positively associated with employability, though the translation of the one into the other is not necessarily seamless and may be moderated by a variety of factors (Donald, Van der Heijden, & Manville, 2024). Given prevailing economic conditions and (uneven) access to employability capital, entry into (or persistence within) the labor market then requires individual actions (e.g., applying for jobs, impressing interviewers, pursuing back-up plans). Employability may be defined as the perceived and/or objective ability to obtain employment (e.g., Forrier & Sels, 2003; Guilbert et al., 2016) as well as the ability to maintain or regain employment. The maintenance of employment (or career choice stability) is influenced by a host of factors that are the focus of existing career theories, such as the dynamics of fit between the individual’s work personality (e.g., skills, qualifications, interests) and the demands of, and reinforcers provided by, the work environment (e.g., Nauta, 2021; Swanson & Schneider, 2021).

Continuing employability can also be affected by fluctuating conditions in the larger economy (e.g., changes in technology) or by idiosyncratic events that endanger people’s jobs or affect how they are performed. The effect of such career shocks (Blokker et al., 2019) are shown in the figure as a lightning strike at the employability level but, in fact, such shocks can occur elsewhere on the pyramid, for example, shaking the economic base. Because work stability cannot be assured and is, in fact, not always desired (as when people leave the paid job market to become parents or to train for career changes), an adequate conception of employability must also take into account people’s capacity to make both voluntary and involuntary work transitions (e.g., from school or unemployment to work).

Employment Quality

Being and remaining employed exposes people to a range of more and less desired work conditions, or variations in employment quality. This includes such work characteristics as job security, adequacy of wages in relation to cost of living, safety of the work environment, access to health and retirement benefits, and opportunities for growth. Moreover, employment quality includes conditions that shape work–nonwork boundaries (e.g., schedule control, predictability, leave access), which can either support or undermine work–life balance.

Although it encompasses characteristics associated with “decent work” (Blustein & Duffy, 2021), the term “employment quality” avoids the labeling of work per se as decent or (by implication) indecent, which can risk further marginalizing, albeit unintentionally, those who labor in essential but low skilled, dangerous, or physically demanding roles or who, for a variety of reasons, take on precarious work. Also, terms such as employment quality or worker-friendly conditions allow for differences in perspectivity – for example, the possibility that workers can view their own work behavior as decent, meaningful, and worthy, regardless of whether or not an external observer would wish to perform it – and may guard against the tendency to limit attention to forms of work traditionally associated with middle class values.

Career Flourishing

An influential perspective on career sustainability defines this construct in relation to the attainment of health, happiness, and productivity (HHP) outcomes (De Vos et al., 2020), or career success and satisfaction (Donald, Van der Heijden, & Manville, 2024), which are shown at the apex of the hierarchy in Figure 1. These may be considered as indicators of career flourishing that rest upon conditions in the larger and local economy, employability capital, employability, and employment quality. While I have incorporated the HHP outcomes as they have been defined by career sustainability theorists, there is a point at which they begin to blend into descriptors of optimal life functioning that are not specific to the work domain. For example, health transcends life domains and can be shaped by many non-work factors. To help manage this conceptual drift, I will center those aspects of functioning that are work-domain anchored – that is, outcomes that are expressed in the context of work roles and settings (e.g., work-related happiness or job satisfaction and role performance). This distinction does allow for the presence of cross-situational person qualities (e.g., trait affect) and spill-over effects from (and to) other life roles and domains (e.g., family caregiving).

Career flourishing need not be seen as a race to the top of the pyramid where only a fortunate few can arrive. Workers may, in fact, be satisfied and effective in a wide range of work situations, and HHP outcomes are not the inevitable consequence of higher status, vocational privilege, or higher employment quality. Indeed, some high-status roles may offer strong pay and security yet be accompanied by chronic overload, value conflict, or hostile climates that erode health and happiness. Conversely, working in a lower-status role does not automatically imply job dissatisfaction or ill-health, particularly when the work context affords adequate person-environment (P–E) fit and other valued features (e.g., social connection, flexible scheduling). Yet possibilities for career flourishing are often greater in well-resourced work environments with higher employment quality, which may allow more opportunity to shape P-E fit, obtain valued rewards, exercise agency over how work is performed, or support work-life balance.

Rather than representing the endpoint of sustainability, the HHP outcomes have the potential to form a feedback loop to employability; thus even though not shown in Figure 1, flourishing and employability are likely to be recursively related. For example, employability can set the table for career flourishing to occur by expanding access to valued work conditions, while flourishing (e.g., as reflected by successful role performance) can enable further employability. However, neither direction of impact is inevitable. For example, workers may remain employable despite not flourishing in poor-quality or ill-fitting environments, and successful work performance does not guarantee protection against job loss in the face of layoffs, restructuring, or technological displacement. The strength and direction of these links are likely to be moderated by structural conditions (e.g., job availability, discrimination) and organizational practices (e.g., workload, supportive supervision). Because career sustainability is an ongoing process (De Vos et al., 2020), active efforts are generally required on workers’ and employers’ parts (e.g., management of person-job fit; Talluri et al., 2025) to boost or maintain states of flourishing which, like the health of natural environments, may wax and wane over time.

In sum, the hierarchical model consolidates elements that are frequently studied in relation to career sustainability. But their simple pyramidal ordering does not adequately convey the dynamic processes through which P and E variables give rise to career sustainability or what workers can do to try to foster their own sustainability. Rather, more detailed theoretical analyses can suggest the causal sequencing among variables and the key mechanisms involved in growing, protecting, and resurrecting careers over time and across career stages. I will later outline a social cognitive perspective on these processes but will first consider a few definitional issues and controversies that I had side-stepped in presenting the hierarchical model.

Career Sustainability and Employability: Where Do the Twain Meet?

Career sustainability is typically described as consisting of something more than employability, though different writers emphasize different add-on features. It may, therefore, be useful to consider employability and career sustainability, and their interrelations, in a bit more depth, with an eye toward points of possible convergence between different theoretical positions.

Career Sustainability as Employability

Employability, the older topic of inquiry (Forrier & Sels, 2003; Guilbert et al., 2016), has often been operationalized as one’s chance – perceived or actual – of finding a job (Harrari et al., 2021) in the internal and/or external labor market (i.e., with one’s current employer or another employer). Perceived employability refers to individuals’ subjective assessment of their employment prospects or marketability (e.g., De Cuyper & De Witte, 2010; Eby et al., 2003). Objective or actual employability can be indexed in a variety of ways, such as one’s current employment status or demonstrated attractiveness to employers (e.g., number of job offers received during a job search). It is important to note that perceived and objective employability often correlate only modestly (Cortellazzo et al., 2020; Okay-Somerville & Scholarios, 2015) – and only one of them can be expected to reliably put food on the table.

Employability has been an attractive yet complex target of study. On the one hand, some conceptualizations and measures (e.g., perceived ability to find a job, current employment status) require relatively few assumptions regarding where and how people work, what motivates them to work, or what constitutes essential working conditions. Such a tight focus makes it easier to differentiate employability from other constructs and, at least in theory, enables study of a broad spectrum of work (e.g., gig, project-based) and workers (those without higher education) – not only those with advanced credentials who work in relatively stable, organization-based jobs.

On the other hand, such simple definitions can gloss over critical questions about what constitutes sufficient employability. For example, they are neutral regarding the cost of living, an individual's qualifications (e.g., market-value capital), or their employment objectives (e.g., full vs. part-time work). More complex conceptual and operational definitions of employability may pose their own problems. For example, they risk blurring conceptual boundaries by bundling employability (i.e., the ability to obtain, maintain, and/or regain work) together with its predictors (e.g., social capital, personal adaptability, or the reputation of one’s educational institution), thereby complicating efforts to achieve a clearer understanding of employability, its antecedents, and consequences.

A recent branch of the literature focuses on “sustainable employability” (Alcover et al., 2021; Van der Klink et al., 2016), which can be defined as individuals’ long-term ability to work and to remain employed (Fleuren et al., 2020). Though it is not always clear how it differs from employability as broadly defined, there is a tendency in this literature to focus less on work acquisition at career entry and more on work retention at mid and late career stages. It also includes a focus on issues, such as worker age and health, that can pose threats to long-term employability, thus contributing to the understanding of career sustainability as preservation of work options in the context of challenging conditions.

Career Sustainability as Flourishing

As noted earlier, De Vos and colleagues (e.g., De Vos et al., 2020) have proposed that sustainable careers are chiefly marked by three groups of indicators: happiness (e.g., job satisfaction), health (physical and psychological), and productivity (e.g., level of task and contextual performance). Somewhat curiously, in their model, employability is considered an aspect of productivity rather than a unique construct. Such a view fails to note that work productivity ordinarily presupposes that one has a job. By reflecting one’s prior work achievements, level of productivity can also enhance (or diminish) one’s future employability. In other words, rather than treating employability and productivity as manifestations of the same thing, it seems useful to conceptualize them as distinct and likely bidirectionally linked.

De Vos et al. (2020) offered a “dynamic process model”, consisting of person, contextual, person-career fit, and temporal elements seen as giving rise to the HHP outcomes. Yet in equating career sustainability with the HHP dimensions, their position implies that a sustainable career is fundamentally about thriving rather than about having a job that at least makes ends meet – that is, living well versus making a living. It also directs attention toward the already-employed, neglecting the experiences of the unemployed and those facing employment transitions and career insecurity. Viewing career flourishing as the floor rather than the ceiling of career sustainability may leave career scientists and practitioners unprepared to deal with large-scale unemployment and underemployment emerging from successive waves of economic and technological disruption (Friedman, 2016).

The De Vos et al. (2020) approach has come to be referred to as sustainable career theory and has subsequently been integrated into a larger sustainable career ecosystem framework (e.g., Donald, Van der Heijden, & Manville, 2024). A variety of other career theories have also been extended to the study of career sustainability (e.g., see Matani & Singh, 2025), though they have not always adhered to De Vos and colleagues’ tendency to equate sustainability with the HHP indicators. Greenhaus et al. (2024) catalogued more than a dozen conceptualizations of career sustainability, noting that the majority of them emphasize some aspects of positive experience associated with employment. Consistent with De Vos et al.’s position, Greenhaus et al. (2024) asserted that career sustainability is a dynamic process, involving “the extent to which an individual attains health, happiness, and productivity at work and maintains these experiences over the course of the career” (p. 482; italics added).

Greenhaus et al. (2024) also suggested that the diversity of conceptions of career sustainability has given rise to a host of measures, including indices of (a) employment status, (b) some combination of happiness, health, and productivity, and (c) an eclectic category including such qualities as self-awareness, flexibility, growth, and career advancement. In fact, at least four new measures, each labeled as career sustainability, have appeared in just the past three years (Chin et al., 2022; Kim et al., 2024; Russo et al., 2025; Söner & Duru, 2025), with none of them appearing to tap quite the same set of constructs. Of the four, only the Russo et al. measure appears to map largely, though not exclusively, on to the HHP dimensions. Some of these new measures also appear to conflate career sustainability with its presumed predictors (e.g., elements of proactive career behavior). Thus, the lack of consensus on how to conceptualize and measure career sustainability appears to remain a challenge to progress in this literature at present.

Career Sustainability as Employability Plus Employment Quality

The De Vos et al. (2020) framework is accompanied by other positions that view career sustainability as some combination of employability plus additional ingredients. A partial list of such additives includes engagement in work that provides opportunities for career advancement, job security, continual growth and renewal, life-long learning, flexibility, social justice, and harmonious co-existence with other life roles (Greenhaus et al., 2024). Such positions, then, link career sustainability to the attainment of employment quality (Figure 1), without requiring that they need to eventuate in HHP outcomes. Yet other positions emphasize sustainability qualities that workers should possess, such as flexibility, adaptability, resilience, and a growth mindset (Greenhaus et al., 2024), though it is not always clear where or how these can be acquired.

Adding the variety of “employability-plus” ingredients to the HHP outcomes highlights the conceptual hurdles in trying to forge a unified view of career sustainability. Which valued employment conditions, outcomes, or worker qualities should we elevate to required status? Must a sustainable career feature all of them or some vaunted subset? While it may be overly optimistic to expect a consensus to emerge on these matters anytime soon, it may be useful to shift the focus from ideal qualities of work and workers to the more prosaic but meaningful matter of what behaviors can be cultivated to try to enable employability. This would add a doing (process) emphasis to the having (possession of employer-provided conditions or fortuitous worker states and traits) perspective that tends to dominate discussions of career sustainability.

Career Sustainability as Self-Management Process

Although they described it as a cyclical, self-regularity process model, De Vos et al.’s (2020; Donald, Van der Heijden, & Manville, 2024) framework is largely focused on what they see as the outcomes or payoffs of sustainability, that is, HHP. Likewise, the “employability plus” perspective focuses on the ends of sustainability, though it stops just short of the pyramid’s apex in Figure 1. Neither perspective offers much specificity about what can be done to try to maintain one’s employability or seek the beneficial outcomes of work amidst economic uncertainty. From a process-agentic perspective, sustainability might be defined in relation to workers’ active efforts to adapt to, maintain, advance in, or change their work situations (Lent & Brown, 2020).

This focus on sustainability as a process could be merged with sensitivity to content aspects of sustainability, in particular, the implications of occupational field or job choice for employability. Despite their near-universal reach, AI and other forms of work disruption and innovation are likely to affect particular forms of work differentially in the foreseeable future, and some of these trends are already apparent. For example, recent lists of careers projected to be significantly impacted or eliminated by technological advances (e.g., World Economic Forum, 2025) can be likened to lists of endangered species in the ecological context. Because the fields that people decide to pursue bear on their initial and continuing employability, career theories that emphasize choice content and the decision-making process (e.g., Lent & Brown, 2020; Nauta, 2021; Swanson & Schneider, 2021) might well be added to the mix of perspectives relevant to understanding and promoting career sustainability. Among other things, such theories emphasize access to occupational information, including job market projections which, at a preventive level, could be used to help forestall work instability by identifying jobs with more and less endurance potential.

Career Sustainability Within a Social Cognitive Framework

In this section, I will offer a preliminary effort to sketch out a social cognitive framework for the study and promotion of career sustainability. The framework might be described as employability-centric in that it embraces the assumption that career sustainability is predicated on one’s ability to (a) obtain, (b) retain, and (c) regain work, especially when faced with threats to work stability. This places emphasis on navigating employability in a dynamic context and views sustainability in terms of ongoing agentic efforts that draw upon career advancement and protection behaviors, not unlike having a good defense to complement a good offense in sports parlance. The defensive aspect would include buffering oneself against work disruption and resource depletion as well as building capacity for work renewal. That is, career sustainability at a process level is most salient in relation to potential or actual threats to continuing employment; it also draws attention to the resources, personal and contextual, that can be used to meet these threats – both at a particular point in time and over the long run.

A few caveats are in order. First, the social cognitive perspective does not assume that agency is either unlimited or equally distributed among workers; it does not assume that all environmental barriers (e.g., decreased demand for certain kinds of work) can simply be managed away. Second, this perspective does not assume that attainment of ideal levels of work enjoyment, success, or employment quality is the goal of, or possible for, all workers. Indeed, many find HHP equivalencies in life roles other than paid work. Third, a sustainable career is viewed as one in which the individual has the potential to attain at least tolerable P-E fit, adequate compensation, and continuing employment. This is by no means an endorsement of bare-bones employment or precarious work. It is, rather, a view of employability as the basis for economic survival and the gateway to career flourishing. Because some workers are especially vulnerable to systemic forces (e.g., job elimination due to AI advances or offshoring), a focus on self-management and agency needs to be paired with attention to the base of the pyramid in Figure 1 (e.g., job creation and safety net repair by governments).

It is also important to acknowledge that work is often motivated by reinforcers beyond pay alone, such as social connection and contribution, temporal structuring, maintenance of personal and public identity, and existential or eudaimonic benefits (e.g., purpose, meaning, self-actualization) (Lent & Brown, 2021a). But fulfillment of such values is predicated on access to paid work for those compelled to work for a living. This casts career sustainability on a larger, more inclusive stage than might be apparent if one were to limit the focus to HHP or attainment of only certain designated conditions. Thriving, or flourishing, shown at the top of the pyramid in Figure 1, may more accurately be understood, then, as the pinnacle of career progression rather than as the essence of employability.

Career sustainability can be studied from a wide range of conceptual positions, such as conservation of resources, self-determination, lifespan development, ecosystem, and P-E fit (De Vos et al., 2020; Donald, Van der Heijden, & Manville, 2024; Talluri et al., 2025). Within the developmental camp, Super’s life-span, life-space approach highlights ongoing career maintenance and management tasks (Hartung, 2021), and life design/career construction approaches emphasize adaptive capacities for navigating change, transitions, and employability (Savickas, 2021; Savickas et al., 2009). Career adaptability, a key construct in career construction theory, has been shown to correlate moderately to strongly with employability, promotability, and self-rated work performance (e.g., Rudolph et al., 2017).

SCCT has also been among the theories that researchers have used to study career sustainability and employability (cf. Duggal et al., 2024; Matani & Singh, 2025). My goal here is to overview existing findings relevant to SCCT and to place them within a few organizing structures. I will touch on three larger foci: (a) career preparation and entry, (b) preparedness against career shocks, and (c) coping with and recovering from work disruptions, especially job loss. These do not map clearly on to distinct career development stages because, to remain employable, workers may need to negotiate multiple challenges (e.g., career advancement and protection) at the same time or to recycle through earlier tasks, such as career decision-making, over time. In addition, career shocks can occur at any stage, even right after work entry. The scheme presented below is intended to be broadly relevant to workers aspiring toward linear, organization-based career paths as well as those pursuing more protean or temporary work paths.

Employability in Relation to Career Entry and the Job Search Process

Concerns about career readiness and employability are evident in the literatures on school to work transition and higher education (e.g., Duggal et al., 2024). A number of studies grounded in the CSM model, or incorporating social cognitive elements, have focused on factors that predict, or that may be predicted by, employability in student samples.

Employability, Career Decision Self-Efficacy, and Proactive Career Behaviors

Several studies have explored the relations among career decision self-efficacy, various proactive career behaviors, and perceived employability. For example, in a study of Chinese undergraduates, Yang and Zhang (2022) reported that career decision self-efficacy and networking behavior were each directly predictive of perceived employability; they also mediated the relation of work-related skills development to perceived employability. Studying Taiwanese college students, Huang (2015) found that perceived employability related strongly to career decision self-efficacy and moderately with two personality variables, positive affectivity and hardiness; it also yielded a small but significant, negative correlation with negative affectivity. Perceived employability was also linked to proactive career behaviors in studies of Australian undergraduates (Creed & Hughes, 2013) and South Korean apprentice employees (Park et al., 2022).

Employability, Job Search Self-Efficacy, and Search Behaviors

Other researchers have studied job search self-efficacy (JSSE) and other elements of the CSM model in relation to employability. Though career decision self-efficacy is seen as playing key roles in helping students to explore and orient toward a career path, theoretically, JSSE may play a more direct role at the point where they are seeking employment. JSSE specifically reflects beliefs about one’s ability to perform behaviors aimed at finding a job (e.g., using social networks, preparing resumes, planning a search schedule, interviewing effectively). Studying a sample of college students in the United Kingdom, Okay-Somerville and Scholarios (2015) found that JSSE was moderately related to measures of perceived and objective employability (receipt of job offers, employment status, and employment quality). They also found that measures of personality (positive affect) and proactive career behavior were linked to one or more objective employability criteria either directly or indirectly via JSSE.

Stremersch et al. (2021) extended the CSM model by examining various dimensions of job search quality among Flemish university students in Belgium. They found that the relations of JSSE and conscientiousness to job attainment were mediated by two job search quality behaviors (goal setting and persistence). These findings reflect the active process by which JSSE translates into objective employability; they also extend prior research that has examined predictors of job search goals and behaviors but without studying its linkage to job attainment (e.g., Lim et al., 2016).

An Integrative Model Linking Perceived to Objective Employability

It is useful to consider the complementary or differential ways in which perceived employability and JSSE are linked to objective employability, or job acquisition. SCCT acknowledges that social cognitive constructs can be conceptualized and measured at differing levels of specificity, from more general to increasingly finer-grained levels (Lent & Brown, 2006). Accordingly, perceived employability may be framed as generalized beliefs about achieving the outcome of a job search (e.g., “I am confident in landing a job”; Liu et al., 2014), while JSSE involves beliefs about performing the specific behaviors involved in the process. Biramo et al. (2025) found that JSSE partly mediated the relation of perceived employability to job search behavior in a sample of unemployed youth in Ethiopia. Studying Chinese college students, Liu et al. found that, at the within-person level, JSSE was more likely than perceived employability to relate positively to job search behavior which, in turn, was associated with job offers (objective employability). Zheng et al. (2025) have reviewed additional findings linking JSSE to the enactment of job search behaviors and objective employability in student samples from a variety of countries.

Figure 2 brings together perceived employability, JSSE, their predictors and outcomes within an integrative model of job acquisition. Consistent with Biramo et al.’s (2025) findings, JSSE may be seen as informed by and as channeling the effects of more general employability beliefs on job search behavior. In other words, from a social cognitive perspective, JSSE may help explain how people translate their general optimism about becoming employed into tangible steps that help them to organize and orchestrate their job search behavior, leading to objective employability. Interestingly, from an employability capital perspective, JSSE may represent a form of psychological capital that promotes perceived employability. That is, believing oneself adept at navigating the search process can bolster confidence that one will eventually receive a job offer. Thus, in addition to the directional path from perceived employability to JSSE shown in the figure, a reciprocal path (not shown) is plausible.

Figure 2.

Perceived employability and job search self-efficacy in relation to their hypothesized predictors and outcomes. Note. GSE = generalized self-efficacy or confidence; PP = proactive personality

The figure also depicts the theorized overlapping and unique predictors of perceived employability and JSSE. Contextual supports and barriers, certain forms of employability capital, and personal traits and resources (e.g., proactive personality, generalized self-efficacy) are seen as precursors of both forms of self-belief – though specific types of contextual variable may be differentially relevant to perceived employability (e.g., low unemployment rates) versus JSSE (e.g., job-finding role models and mentors). Proactive career behaviors (e.g., networking) are, by contrast, conceived as more likely to operate via perceived employability; and the four sources of task-specific self-efficacy (e.g., prior mastery experiences at job-finding) are viewed as more specific to the formation and maintenance of JSSE beliefs.

Contextual supports and barriers are posited to yield direct (as well as indirect) paths to job search behavior and objective employability. For example, family support may help job-seekers to persist despite set-backs. Contextual variables may also moderate the relation between search behavior and job offers. For example, search behavior is likely to be only modestly related to job acquisition because the outcome is subject to multiple influences beyond the individual’s control (e.g., quality of competing job seekers, subjective impressions of interviewers). The search-outcome link may be stronger under more favorable contextual conditions, such as when unemployment rates are low and the demand for one’s job credentials is high. Moreover, search behaviors are enacted differently by different persons. Stremersch et al.’s (2021) findings point to qualities of search behavior (e.g., goal setting, persistence) that help determine their efficacy.

Three additional considerations are worth highlighting. First, Figure 2 should be viewed as a variation on the basic CSM model of the job search process (Lent & Brown, 2013). Given the current purpose, some predictors have been omitted for simplicity (e.g., job search outcome expectations and goals) and other elements (e.g., employability capital, perceived employability) have been added. Second, this model is presented as relevant to the job search process both at career entry and at later points in career development, as people seek to change jobs. Third, the sequence shown in the figure – from perceived employability and JSSE to job search behavior and its outcomes – is intended to represent the experience of those who must look for work in order to obtain it. However, this is not the case for everyone. Some workers, for example, join family businesses, become self-employed, or are recruited by employers. In such instances, the job acquisition process may be short-circuited such that objective employability is achieved largely via employability (e.g., social) capital, contextual supports, or entrepreneurial activity rather than by applying for job openings.

Employability and Choice Content

Because employability may be linked not only to process variables (e.g., engagement in networking) but also to content dimensions of career behavior, especially the fields that students choose to enter, applications of the SCCT choice model are also relevant to initial (and continuing) employability. For example, in the recent past, STEM college majors were widely seen as leading to stable career paths. Much of the research on the SCCT choice model has focused on interest in, selection of, and persistence at STEM fields. Meta-analyses have indicated that self-efficacy and outcome expectations serve as reliable predictors of interests and, along with interests, predict choice goals and actions in STEM fields (Lent et al., 2018; Sheu et al., 2010). Outcome expectations have included beliefs about extent to which receipt of a STEM degree will lead to indicators of employment quality, such as getting a good job offer, earning an attractive salary, and going into a field with strong employment demand. Such beliefs, however, are subject to changing job outlook projections for certain STEM fields (World Economic Forum, 2025).

At a practical level, the shifts in STEM field outlook highlight the importance of merging consideration of content, process, and context into career planning prior to career entry (Lent & Brown, 2020). It also emphasizes efforts at career preparedness prior to work entry (Lent, 2013, 2018). For example, students may be well-served by considering not only what field to major in but how they can adjust their plans when employment outlooks shift or other barriers arise (e.g., academic difficulties). New strategies, such as choice architecture, have been suggested (but not yet fully implemented or tested) to assist students to consider job market projections, broader-based educational strategies (e.g., double-majors), and field placements that may enhance their employability, especially in the face of shifting economic fortunes (Lent, 2025b).

Employability After Career Entry: Primary Prevention Strategies

Once people enter the workforce, they cannot be assured that their career planning is done or that their subsequent trajectory will be upward, linear, and stable over the course of their working lives. Regardless of their pre-entry planning, the CSM model assumes that workers may be aided by engaging in a variety of strategies aimed at (a) career growth and maintenance, (b) preparedness for work disruptions and for capitalizing on new work opportunities, and (c) management of the stresses of job loss or interruption, if and when they occur. The first two sets of strategies involve proactive coping, while the third involves reactive coping. Collectively, these strategies, along with the resources that facilitate their use, are intended to enhance long-term employability, despite periods of work instability – and assuming that access to viable work opportunities is available.

Figure 3 portrays the three sets of coping strategies under the headings of career entry and growth, career protection, and career recovery. While interconnected, the flow among them is shown for illustrative purposes and is intended to convey a rough developmental sequence rather than an invariant causal pattern. In reality, the strategies may overlap temporally and strategically. For example, workers may simultaneously seek to grow in their careers and to prevent job loss via networking and periodic, low-level job searching to “test the waters”. This may particularly be the case for those with less traditional, boundaryless, gig, or project-driven careers, where thoughts of career insecurity may never fully recede. Likewise, in managing loss of a full-time job, some workers may take on temporary forms of employment or training that can lead to new directions for career growth. Another caveat is that not all work disruptions can be anticipated or warded off; some can come suddenly and without warning. Still, it is assumed that periodic engagement in career preparedness activities has the potential to lessen the blow of both expected and unexpected career shocks as well as to orient one toward novel opportunities for career growth and regeneration.

Figure 3.

Career sustaining agency in career growth, protection, and recovery modes

It is possible to classify strategies to promote and maintain employability within two larger categories: (a) relatively routine, proactive behaviors aimed at career advancement and maintenance and (b) somewhat more out-of-the-ordinary tasks involved in anticipation of, and preparedness for, periods of work instability or unemployment. Though they may overlap in substance and intent (e.g., upskilling can both enhance one’s current qualifications and serve as a hedge against job loss), they can also imply somewhat differing levels of concern about one’s job stability or security. These may, therefore, be thought of as level 1 and level 2 coping strategies, respectively. Level 1 may be likened to a green traffic light and Level 2 to a yellow light, signaling caution ahead. I will frame both sets of strategies within the context of primary prevention – that is, understanding what workers can do to try to forestall threats to their employability or to minimize the impact of these threats if they cannot be avoided.

Proactive Career Sustaining Behaviors, Attitudes, and Resources (Level 1 Coping)

There is a robust literature on proactive career behaviors, which may be defined as the “individual’s active attempts to promote [their] career rather than a passive response to the job situation” (Parker & Collins, 2010). They are often operationalized with a proactive career behavior scale consisting of career planning, proactive skill development, career consultation, and network-building sub-scales (Claes & Ruiz-Quintanilla, 1998; Strauss et al., 2012). Employing the CSM model, Lent et al. (2022) conceptualized proactive career behavior as a key agentic mechanism linking cognitive (self-efficacy, outcome expectations), social (supervisory support), and personality (proactive personality) variables to three career advancement and sustainability outcomes, perceived employability (indexed by job marketability), career satisfaction, and growth in work rewards. Their findings indicated that proactive personality and supervisor support each predicted proactive self-efficacy and outcome expectations which, in turn, were predictive of proactive career behaviors. Self-efficacy and proactive career behaviors both contributed directly to the prediction of job marketability and organizational rewards growth, whereas self-efficacy alone predicted career satisfaction.

In a subsequent study, Lent et al. (2024) examined the dimensionality of a variety of measures commonly used to measure proactive career behaviors and related constructs, finding that they represented three larger, interrelated factors, labeled (a) looking ahead (e.g., engaging in self-reflection and skill development efforts); (b) looking to others (e.g., networking and consulting with colleagues and supervisors); and (c) looking around (e.g., monitoring job alternatives proactively). The three factors were, in turn, subsumed by a larger construct, which could be labeled career sustaining behavior. Such behavior includes yet expands upon the common conception and measurement of proactive career behavior; its label implies that it can be applied specifically and strategically to try to safeguard one’s career.

As shown in Figure 4, results of a structural path analysis indicated that, along with conceptually relevant self-efficacy measures, engagement in career sustaining behaviors was predictive of both internal and external job marketability (i.e., perceptions that one could find employment both within and outside of one’s current work organization). Supervisor support also served as a direct predictor of internal, though not external, marketability. Similar to the findings of Lent et al. (2022), supervisor support and proactive personality were also linked both to self-efficacy and engagement in career sustaining behaviors. (Note that Figure 4 contains a sub-set of the predictors and outcomes from Figure 2 and divides perceived employability into two types, internal and external marketability.) Other researchers have found that individual elements of the CSM model, such as proactive career behaviors (Chughtai, 2019; Jiang et al., 2023) and proactive personality (Yang & Chau, 2016), were related to perceived employability in samples of workers in Asian countries.

Figure 4.

Model of career self-management as applied to career sustainability behaviors. *p < .05, 1-tailed. Reprinted from Lent et al. (2024)

Preparedness for Work Instability and Opportunity (Level 2 Coping)

Lent and Brown (2020) had suggested that preparedness for career disruptions should begin relatively early in the career development process. In particular, they recommended helping students to prepare for career setbacks as a routine and intentional part of interventions for career choice and decision-making. That is, in addition to focusing on making initial career or educational choices, psychoeducational and counseling interventions might help identify particular factors that could hinder choice pursuit (e.g., difficulty passing required courses; conflicts with significant others), and on cultivating strategies and supports in advance to cope with them. They assumed that preparedness for likely barriers to one’s preferred choice may promote choice sustainability.

While Lent and Brown (2020) emphasized factors that could affect short-term implementation of one’s choice, such a preparedness agenda could also be aimed at more continuous planning for adverse work events and economic downturns that can materialize at any point after work entry. Though some career shocks can be unexpected, others may come with warnings, just as lightning strikes are often preceded by thunder rumblings that vary in frequency and intensity. Whereas weather forecasts may trigger simple acts of preparedness, such as carrying an umbrella, preparedness for career shocks may require a bit more vigilance and effort. Hence, their classification under Level 2, or “yellow light” coping strategies.

Career shocks may conjure the image of unwelcome events affecting the well-being of individual workers. That is, the shock may be local, temporary, and with minimal spread to others. However, because of their potential magnitude, some events may be more akin to tsunamis than shocks. Such is the case with technological developments like AI that may affect large segments of the workforce, especially in jobs involving use of routine physical or cognitive skills. Given the attention this issue has received in recent years, one might assume that many workers and career development professionals have now heard the thunder. Indeed, many have already directly experienced career insecurity or job losses owing to technological “advances”.

How might psychologists and counselors best prepare workers for such threats to their livelihoods? One very relevant CSM-informed study found that Filipino workers’ perceptions of being replaced by AI were predictive of their career exploration behavior both directly and indirectly, via job insecurity and psychological distress (Presbitero & Teng-Calleja, 2023). Thus, proactive exploration of alternative work options represents a viable intervention element in assisting workers to prepare for job instability, especially in the presence of a defined threat.

While the general concept of career preparedness is not new (Lent, 2013), it would be useful to develop CSM model extensions specifically aimed at conceptualizing preparedness against work instability. The basic CSM model and prior research on proactive and career sustaining behaviors could be adapted for this purpose. While development of a full, testable model of instability preparedness exceeds the scope of this article, I will cite a few elements that seem viable candidates for such a model. These include contingency planning (developing a clear backup plan if one’s current job becomes unstable), skill diversification (cultivating skills outside of one’s primary job that could enable transition to an alternative job or career path), and financial preparedness (planning financially for the possibility of unexpected job loss or for supporting a redirection of one’s career).

These three behaviors may represent level 2 versions of the “looking ahead” proactive career behaviors studied by Lent et al. (2022, 2024). They are aimed more precisely at career protection and survival than at advancement, though they may draw on overlapping behaviors. For example, skill diversification differs from more routine skill development in that it is aimed at augmenting one’s skill set with the aim of being able to make career changes or to increase one’s value to a current employer. Examples might include becoming more of a generalist or ”jack of all trades”(cf. Epstein, 2019), doing the reverse (e.g., crafting a relatively unique organizational niche), developing leadership skills that complement technical skills, and heightening one’s organizational citizenship profile (e.g., taking on mentoring or training roles). Financial preparedness is unique compared to more routine proactive career behaviors in that it is specifically directed at maintaining financial survival in the event of work disruptions and in being able to self-fund training and education to support a new career path.

Do I think that most people currently engage extensively in such preparedness behaviors? No. Might performing them often versus only occasionally reflect tendencies toward excessive worry or negative affectivity and, perhaps, accentuate rather than allay job insecurity? That is quite possible. Perhaps there exists an optimal level of preparedness for most workers, where they neither ignore nor obsess over prospects for work disruption. These represent useful empirical questions. If preparedness strategies prove fruitful in calming rather than stoking employment anxiety, they might be cultivated via psychoeducational interventions that could be added to career courses and workshops or built into online career tools (Lent, 2025a). For example, digital assistants can be used to prompt periodic, perhaps annual, self-directed career health check-ups that include, among other things, examining the current occupational outlook of one’s job and estimating the adequacy of one’s emergency savings. This process can prompt attention to new opportunities for career growth and not just protection against threats.

Employability After Career Entry: Secondary Prevention Strategies for Coping With Unemployment (Level 3 Coping)

As a type of primary prevention, preparedness may help one to anticipate, avoid, or marshal coping resources ahead of periods of work disruption. Sometimes this may be sufficient to maintain employability and job continuity, though not all job-threatening events can be anticipated or neutralized. In such situations, secondary prevention, or reactive coping, may come in handy to limit the psychological, financial, job-finding, and other stresses posed by job loss. If the level 1 and level 2 coping strategies could be pictured as representing green and yellow lights, respectively, the level 3 coping strategies may be likened to a red light whereby forward career progress has come (hopefully temporarily) to a halt. They involve the behaviors that unemployed workers might perform, aided by the personal, social, and financial resources they possess or can access, to weather career storms and restore employability.

Much of the literature on coping with unemployment has focused on factors that promote job search progress and reemployment. For example, in a meta-analytic review, Kanfer et al. (2001) found that job search behaviors were positively associated with number of job offers and reemployment status, and negatively associated with length of unemployment. They found that other variables that can be encompassed by the CSM model – such as JSSE, social support, conscientiousness, and lower levels of neuroticism – were linked to number of job offers and/or reemployment status as well. Yet those who experience job loss also frequently deal with emotional and financial challenges, apart from job searching. Meta-analytic findings have shown that social support, problem- and emotion-focused coping strategies, and temporal structuring are all modestly linked to positive mental health functioning during unemployment; meanwhile, greater financial strain is associated with lower mental health (McKee-Ryan et al., 2005).

In a series of studies, Lent and colleagues examined the tenability of a CSM-based model of coping with job loss. The goal of the research program was to study multiple predictors and outcomes of coping rather than isolated bivariate relationships. Lent et al. (2023) focused on the hypothesized antecedents and outcomes of psychological coping and job search behavior. Psychological coping included engagement in temporal structuring, social connection, and emotional regulation activities. They found that both forms of coping were predicted significantly by social support and proactive personality. Psychological coping was, in turn, a positive predictor of both emotional well-being and job search progress. Engagement in job search behavior also contributed to job search progress. Psychological distress was predicted negatively by social support and positively by perceived financial strain. However, neither form of coping explained unique variance in psychological distress.

Wang and Lent (2024) added a focus on self-efficacy for coping with both the psychological and job search challenges of job loss. They found that both forms of self-efficacy were predicted by proactive personality and coping-specific measures of social support. They also reported that emotional well-being was well-predicted by the combination of psychological coping behavior and self-efficacy and by lower levels of financial strain. Psychological distress was predicted (positively) by financial strain and (negatively) by psychological coping efficacy.

In addition to the previous predictors (e.g., coping efficacy, coping behavior, social support, and financial strain) of psychological and job search outcomes, Lent et al. (2026) examined a variety of financial coping behaviors engaged in by unemployed workers (e.g., debt management, reliance on significant others for financial support). Psychological coping efficacy and financial strain were the most consistent predictors of the well-being, distress, and job search progress outcomes, though social support and coping behavior each accounted for unique variance in two of the three outcomes. Other researchers have also examined multivariate models of job loss coping containing variables that overlap with the CSM model (e.g., Gowan et al., 1999; Lin & Leung, 2010; Solove et al., 2015).

Directions for Theory, Research, and Practice

Consistent with the position I have taken in this article, I would recommend making employability the primary focus of research on career sustainability because finding, keeping, and restoring work are fundamental to economic survival and prerequisites for career flourishing. At the same time, the hierarchical model suggests that research on sustainability does not need to end with employability. Employability and flourishing can be seen as representing a continuum between work that offers basic financial survival and work that provides varying access to additional rewards, such as meaning, service to others, and career success and satisfaction.

Integrating Sustainability-specific and General Career Development Models

It seems important to consider how newer, sustainability-specific theories (e.g., De Vos et al., 2020) can be better integrated with more general models of career development, well-being, and performance (e.g., see Lent & Brown, 2021b). Though both approaches share a concern with positive aspects of career functioning, a failure to build substantive connections between them may unnecessarily fragment the literature and impede progress toward a more comprehensive understanding of career development under both normative and adverse conditions. There is also a need to avoid becoming fixated on the apex of the career sustainability pyramid (Figure 1) and, instead, to expand study of the strategies, resources, and conditions that may enable coping in less favorable work situations and unstable economic environments.

The literature on career sustainability may, in particular, profit from more inquiry on how people try to protect their careers from (and resurrect them after) work disruptions. In other words, a focus on sustainability may derive its unique value in aiding understanding of what might be done to help people prevent and cope with threats to employability. Such inquiry could involve qualitative, quantitative, and mixed research methods and include efforts to elaborate and test models that combine content (e.g., field choice), process (proactive and adaptive strategies; empowering person qualities), and contextual (e.g., organizational support) aspects of career sustainability (Lent & Brown, 2020).

The Need to “Unbox” Perceived Employability

I had earlier raised concerns about definitions and measures that may conflate perceived employability (or employability generally) with other variables by, for example, representing it either as a latent variable or collection of scales containing various aspects of employability capital (e.g., career identity, social networks, personal adaptability). This might be termed the “big box” (or all-in-one) view of employability. The hierarchical model (Figure 1) portrays employability capital as a foundation for, or partial determinant of, employability rather than as an indistinguishable part of it. Likewise, the integrative model in Figure 2 suggests the means by which employability capital and other variables inform, and function along with, employability (defined in terms of perceived ability to obtain work). “Unboxing” perceived employability by distinguishing it from its predictors and co-functioning variables may promote a clearer understanding of the mechanisms that enable objective employability.

Matching Social Cognitive Predictors and Outcomes

It would also be useful to select or design appropriate measures of social cognitive constructs in relation to employability (e.g., Lent et al., 2022). For example, self-efficacy is conceptualized as domain, context, and task specific views of one’s performance capabilities, measures of which should demonstrate adequate reliability and validity to support their use in research (Lent & Brown, 2006). A key feature of social cognitive assessment is the matching of predictors to dependent variables (e.g., using JSSE to predict engagement in corresponding job search behaviors). Common concerns include misalignment between social cognitive predictors and criterion variables (e.g., substituting generalized self-efficacy measures for domain or task-specific ones; Berntson et al., 2008), or using unvalidated measures of self-efficacy in hypothesis testing. Such practices may underestimate variable relationships (Lent & Brown, 2006).

Dimensionality of Trait-like Adaptability Measures

It would be valuable to attend further to the structure of measures of career resilience (Park et al., 2022), adaptability (Savickas, 2021), proactive personality (Seibert et al., 1999), general self-efficacy (Berntson et al., 2008), and conceptually related constructs. A common theme of such variables is the general flexibility or resourcefulness of the worker. While several theories view such qualities as important aspects of the person, it is not clear how the existing array of measures differ from one another, which of them offers the most useful way to capture proactive and adaptive tendencies, or to what extent they reflect reflect common underlying properties. Progress on this front may enable connections to be made across competing theoretical approaches and aid understanding of how such person resources can be promoted in practice to help preserve employability.

Employability in Relation to Underemployment and Diverse Employment Arrangements

Employment status, as a binary variable, tells only a limited part of the story, leaving out important details about the sufficiency or quality of one’s employment. People can, for example, be employed but significantly underemployed. There is thus significant value in research on employability that takes into account job seekers’ employment needs (e.g., salary requirements) and objectives (e.g., full-time vs. part-time work, employment in a specific field vs. any available and acceptable form of work). For example, measures of perceived employability can be adapted that ask not only about one’s potential to land a job but also about securing a job that meets particular criteria. A related need is to extend study of employability to as wide and diverse a range of workers as possible, including the working poor and gig workers, rather than focusing disproportionately on middle class, organization-based employees with linear career objectives.

Sustainability as Coping Process

From a social cognitive perspective, it is useful to devote further study to proactive or career sustainability behaviors and the personal and social resources that promote their use (Lent et al., 2022, 2024). This shifts the focus from sustainability as an outcome to the mechanisms and processes by which people try to propel their careers forward and to protect or resurrect them once things go wrong. Career sustainability behaviors, such as networking and proactive job searching, should be seen as embedded within a larger CSM framework including social and economic contextual factors, social cognitive motivational variables (e.g., self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and goals), and other person inputs, such as proactive personality.

Preparedness for Career Threats

While sustainability behaviors can be seen as aids to career advancement as well as protection under more normative conditions, it may be valuable to better elaborate and test a CSM-based model specifically aimed at preparedness for work instability – one that helps workers to anticipate, and marshal resources to buffer themselves against, work disruptions. Preparedness may combine routine sustainability behaviors with added elements (e.g., periodic assessment of back-up employability and financial plans) that are specifically designed to ward off or weather career shocks. It may be especially useful to direct research to the proactive as well as reactive strategies used by workers who are specifically experiencing job insecurity or employment anxiety (e.g., Presbitero & Teng-Calleja, 2023) – to see which strategies are more likely to allay versus heighten employability related worries and for whom (e.g., those with tendencies toward negative affectivity or conscientiousness).

To have the greatest impact at a prevention level, it may be useful to focus on career preparedness strategies prior to work entry, for example, as students are assisted to assess their career options in relation to field content, process, and contextual factors (Lent & Brown, 2020). Knowing the employment outlook projections related to one’s intended academic major or career field, and considering other potential career path hurdles, may enable students to prepare barrier-coping strategies, to build necessary supports, and/or to consider alternative choice options that may yield a more favorable assessment of benefits in relation to costs.

Reactive Coping

Because not all career shocks can be anticipated, there is value in additional research extending the social cognitive and other theoretical frameworks to coping with job loss – not only in terms of job finding but also in dealing with the psychological, social, and other challenges faced by unemployed persons (Wang & Lent, 2024). Financial strain may be a particular focal point for such research because many unemployed persons have limited resources for neutralizing the financial stresses they face, and some coping strategies have the potential to heighten rather than ameliorate financial strain and, thus, exacerbate psychological distress (Lent et al., 2026). In addition to coping with job loss, there is need for research on coping with other adverse career events (Akkermans et al., 2018), such as demotions, denied promotions, and reduced hours and pay, that can diminish employment quality.

Longitudinal and Intervention Research

While cross-sectional studies of employability can be useful to examine job attainment, retention, or coping with work instability at a particular point in time, career sustainability is best understood as a process that varies over time (Greenhaus et al., 2024). To capture this temporal variability, there is need for more research using longitudinal designs that, for example, follow students during their transitions to finding and adjusting to work and workers recovering from career shocks. There is also need to continue to design and assess novel interventions to promote job seekers’ mental health and employability (e.g., Blustein et al., 2024; Carvalho et al., 2025).

Practice Implications: An Overview of Intervention Targets Across Layers

Figure 1 can be used as a heuristic for identifying whether a client’s primary constraints lie at the economic (e.g., employment scarcity, safety-net gaps), employability capital (e.g., credentials, networks), employability process (e.g., job search skills, JSSE), employment quality (e.g., wages, safety, work–life balance), and/or flourishing (e.g., satisfaction, meaning, performance) levels. This may inform intervention planning, including decisions regarding within-session targets (e.g., skill-building, coping strategies) as well as referrals and advocacy (e.g., benefits navigation, training programs, legal aid, union or employment-center resources). Given space considerations, I will offer selected implications for practice aligned with the employability, employability capital, employment quality, and economic substrate layers of career sustainability in Figure 1.

Individual-Level Interventions (Employability and Coping Processes)

When employability is threatened primarily by limited job search knowledge, low self-efficacy, or demoralization, interventions can target (a) job search motivation and self-regulation (e.g., structured search routines and persistence), (b) job-search skills and confidence (e.g., JSSE; Brown, 2021; Lent & Brown, 2013), (c) career sustaining behaviors that expand opportunity (e.g., networking, monitoring the availability of alternative jobs), and (d) coping strategies during unemployment (e.g., temporal structuring, social connection, and emotion regulation; Lent et al., 2023; Wang & Lent, 2024). In practice, this may include brief skills modules (e.g., resume/interview practice), structured search plans with regular check-ins, barrier-coping plans for setbacks and rejection, and attention to routines that protect sleep, activity, and social contact during unemployment.

A focus on promoting JSSE may be especially useful for clients who lack experience with or information about the job search process. JSSE and its associated skills may be enhanced by designing interventions around the primary sources of efficacy information (Lent & Brown, 2013), including opportunities for guided practice and feedback, exposure to effective models, and supportive coaching to sustain effort despite setbacks. More intensive support may be indicated where sustained delays in finding work lower general employability perceptions and contribute to demoralization that undermines search quality and mental health.

Organizational and Educational Interventions (Employability Capital and Employment Quality)

When sustainability appears to be constrained by inadequate developmental opportunities or poor employment quality, organizational and educational interventions might be used to expand training access and internal mobility pathways and offer mentoring and supportive supervision (e.g., see the supervisor support pathways in Lent et al., 2022, 2024). Employment quality can be aided by organizational practices focused on predictable scheduling, workload management, psychologically safe climates, and boundary-respecting norms that protect work-life balance. Educational institutions can expand their focus on employability preparation in curricula (e.g., structured work-integrated learning; networking supports) and provide scalable digital supports for periodic “career health check-ups” (Lent, 2025a; 2025b). Such practices can have both developmental and preventative benefits.

Policy/System-Level Interventions (Economic Substrate and Equitable Access)

When employability is constrained by macroeconomic scarcity or structural barriers, counseling and training alone are unlikely to be sufficient. Policy and system change targets consistent with the economic substrate layer could include: (a) strengthening unemployment insurance adequacy and coverage; (b) portable benefits and protections for nonstandard and gig workers; (c) active labor market policies (subsidized training, job placement supports, wage insurance); (d) childcare and paid leave infrastructure that supports labor-force involvement and work-life balance; and (e) vigorous enforcement of anti-discrimination and accessibility protections. Such environment-focused changes can have “trickle up” benefits by enhancing employability capital and helping to convert it into actual, sustainable employment. Achieving system-level changes typically requires collective advocacy that exceeds the resources of individual counseling and psychology practitioners. Taken together, these examples underscore that employability-focused counseling is most likely to succeed when complemented by organizational practices and policy supports that shape access to employment opportunity, employability capital, and employment quality.

Conclusion

Career sustainability is an evolving concept that has been defined in a variety of ways. To encourage a unifying perspective, a pyramid metaphor was used to depict career sustainability as a multi-level structure resting on an economic base, with successive layers consisting of employability capital, perceived and actual employability, employment quality, and career flourishing. Employability (making a living) is seen as particularly key to individuals’ economic and occupational survival and, therefore, as fundamental to attaining quality employment and career flourishing (living well). Flourishing, in turn, enables, but cannot guarantee, continuing employability. All things being equal, workers are likely to intend to persist at work they find satisfying and at which they are successful. But things are not always equal or static. As the dynamics of the global job market evolve rapidly due to technological advancements, economic shifts, and social changes, individuals, organizations, and government policy makers all have a large stake in prioritizing strategies that promote sustainable career paths.

Adopting a social cognitive perspective and emphasizing primary and secondary prevention goals, I focused on career sustaining strategies involved in career entry and growth (e.g., routine proactive career behaviors), career protection (preparedness for work instability), and career recovery (reactive coping with job loss). Each set of strategies deserves further conceptual and empirical attention as the basis for psychological and educational interventions aimed at fostering career sustainability, particularly in terms of maintaining employability. It is important to continue exploring practical solutions that address both systemic and individual challenges to career sustainability, better equipping workers both to weather career shocks and to capitalize on opportunity.

The pursuit of career sustainability can encompass both surviving in an ever-changing job market and, to the extent possible, thriving and achieving long-term career well-being. Self-management offers a reasonable way for workers to direct and redirect their own career behavior but will likely prove of limited efficacy if large numbers of jobs simply come off the board and are not replaced with ones that current workers are equipped, or can be readily retrained, to perform. Therefore, career sustainability ultimately requires the input of policy makers, economists, and government planners (e.g., to insure the optimal design of safety nets and retraining programs), and not just a focus on self-management efforts. A multi-level, employability-centric framework can help align counseling, organizational practice, and policy efforts around shared aims, rather than treating sustainability only in individual agentic terms or equating it only with flourishing outcomes.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Drs. Steven D. Brown, Ersoy Carkit, Rachel Gali Cinamon, Ellen B. Lent, Taylor R. Morris, and R. Jason Wang for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

ORCID iD

Robert W. Lent

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

References

Akkermans

Seibert

S. E.

Mol

S. T.

(2018). Tales of the unexpected: Integrating career shocks in the contemporary careers literature. SA Journal of Industrial Psychology, 44(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.4102/sajip.v44i0.1503

Alcover

C. M.

Mazzetti

Vignoli

(2021). Sustainable employability in the mid and late career: An integrative review. Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 37(3), 157–174. https://doi.org/10.5093/jwop2021a16

Berntson

Näswall

Sverke

(2008). Investigating the relationship between employability and self-efficacy: A cross-lagged analysis. European Journal of Work & Organizational Psychology, 17(4), 413–425. https://doi.org/10.1080/13594320801969699

Biramo

Y. B.

Merkine Gebresilase

Elka

Z. Z.

Demissie

E. B.

(2025). The effect of perceived employability on the job search behavior of unemployed youths: The mediating role of job search self-efficacy. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 30(1), Article 2454999. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673843.2025.2454999

Blokker

Akkermans

Tims

Jansen

Khapova

(2019). Building a sustainable start: The role of career competencies, career success, and career shocks in young professionals’ employability. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 112, 172–184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2019.02.013

Blustein

D. L.

Allan

Mazur

Sharone

Autin

Cinamon

R. G.

Kozan

Smith

Stevenson

Thompson

(2024). An evaluation of an integrative intervention for work and mental health: The WIN program. Journal of Career Assessment, 32(2), 343–362. https://doi.org/10.1177/10690727231196143

Blustein

D. L.

Duffy

R. D.

(2021). Psychology of working theory. In Brown

S. D.

Lent

R. W.

(Eds.), Career development and counseling: Putting theory and research to work (3rd ed., pp. 201–235). Wiley.

Brown

S. D.

(2021). Facilitating success in the job search process. In Brown

S. D.

Lent

R. W.

(Eds.), Career development and counseling: Putting theory and research to work (3rd ed.). Wiley.

Carvalho

C. L. D.

Marôco

Taveira

M. D. C.

Silva

A. D.

(2025). Employability resources of unemployed adults: Longitudinal effects of a group career intervention. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, Article 1470611. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1470611

10.

Chin

Jawahar

I. M.

(2022). Development and validation of a career sustainability scale. Journal of Career Development, 49(4), 769–787. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894845321993234

11.

Chughtai

(2019). Servant leadership and perceived employability: Proactive career behaviours as mediators. The Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 40(2), 213–229. https://doi.org/10.1108/lodj-07-2018-0281

12.

Claes

Ruiz-Quintanilla

S. A.

(1998). Influences of early career experiences, occupational group, and national culture on proactive career behavior. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 52(3), 357–378. https://doi.org/10.1006/jvbe.1997.1626

13.

Cortellazzo

Bonesso

Gerli

Batista-Foguet

J. M.

(2020). Protean career orientation: Behavioral antecedents and employability outcomes. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 116, Article 103343. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2019.103343

14.

Creed

P. A.

Hughes

(2013). Career development strategies as moderators between career compromise and career outcomes in emerging adults. Journal of Career Development, 40(2), 146–163. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894845312437207

15.

De Cuyper

De Witte

(2010). Temporary employment and perceived employability: Mediation by impression management. Journal of Career Development, 37(3), 635–652. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894845309357051

16.

De Vos

Van der Heijden

B. I.

Akkermans

(2020). Sustainable careers: Towards a conceptual model. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 117, Article 103196. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2018.06.011

17.

Donald

W. E.

Baruch

Ashleigh

M. J.

(2024). Construction and operationalisation of an Employability Capital Growth Model (ECGM) via a systematic literature review (2016–2022). Studies in Higher Education, 49(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2023.2219270

18.

Donald

W. E.

Van der Heijden

B. I.

Manville

(2024). (Re) framing sustainable careers: Toward a conceptual model and future research agenda. Career Development International, 29(5), 513–526. https://doi.org/10.1108/cdi-02-2024-0073

19.

Duggal

H. K.

Lim

W. M.

Khatri

Thomas

Shiva

(2024). The state of the art on self‐perceived employability. Global Business and Organizational Excellence, 43(4), 88–110. https://doi.org/10.1002/joe.22245

20.

Eby

L. T.

Butts

Lockwood

(2003). Predictors of success in the era of the boundaryless career. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 24(6), 689–708.

21.

Epstein

(2019). Range: Why generalists triumph in a specialized world. Riverhead Books.

22.

Fitzgerald

L. F.

Betz

N. E.

(1994). Career development in cultural context: The role of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation. In Savickas

M. L.

Lent

R. W.

(Eds.), Convergence in career development theories: Implications for science and practice (pp. 103–117). Consulting Psychologists Press.

23.

Fleuren

B. P.

de Grip

Jansen

N. W.

Kant

Zijlstra

F. R.

(2020). Unshrouding the sphere from the clouds: Towards a comprehensive conceptual framework for sustainable employability. Sustainability, 12(16), 6366. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12166366

24.

Forrier

Sels

(2003). The concept employability: A complex mosaic. International Journal of Human Resources Development and Management, 3(2), 102–124. https://doi.org/10.1504/ijhrdm.2003.002414

25.

Friedman

T. L.

(2016). Thank you for being late: An optimist’s guide to thriving in the age of accelerations. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

26.

Gowan

M. A.

Riordan

C. M.

Gatewood

R. D.

(1999). Test of a model of coping with involuntary job loss following a company closing. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84(1), 75–86. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.84.1.75

27.

Greenhaus

J. H.

Callanan

G. A.

Powell

G. N.

(2024). Advancing research on career sustainability. Journal of Career Development, 51(4), 478–497. https://doi.org/10.1177/08948453241260871

28.

Guilbert

Bernaud

J. L.

Gouvernet

Rossier

(2016). Employability: Review and research prospects. International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance, 16(1), 69–89. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10775-015-9288-4

29.

Harari

M. B.

McCombs

Wiernik

B. M.

(2021). Movement capital, RAW model, or circumstances? A meta-analysis of perceived employability predictors. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 131, Article 103657. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2021.103657

30.

Hartung

P. J.

(2021). Life-span, life-space career theory and counseling. In Brown

S. D.

Lent

R. W.

(Eds.), Career development and counseling: Putting theory and research to work (3rd ed., pp. 95–127). Wiley.

31.

Hesketh

(2000). Prevention and development in the workplace. In Brown

S. D.

Lent

R. W.

(Eds.), Handbook of counseling psychology (3rd ed., pp. 471–498). Wiley.

32.

Hirschi

(2018). The fourth industrial revolution: Issues and implications for career research and practice. The Career Development Quarterly, 66(3), 192–204. https://doi.org/10.1002/cdq.12142

33.

Huang

J. T.

(2015). Hardiness, perceived employability, and career decision self-efficacy among Taiwanese college students. Journal of Career Development, 42(4), 311–324. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894845314562960

34.

Jiang

Lei

Zhou

(2023). How do proactive career behaviors translate into subjective career success and perceived employability? The role of thriving at work and humble leadership. Journal of Management and Organization, 30(6), 2088–2104. https://doi.org/10.1017/jmo.2023.67

35.

Kanfer

Wanberg

C. R.

Kantrowitz

T. M.

(2001). Job search and employment: A personality–motivational analysis and meta-analytic review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(5), 837–855. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.5.837

36.

Kim

Lee

Jin

(2024). Development and validation of career sustainability scale for mid-career employees. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, Article 1442119. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1442119

37.

Lent

R. W.

(2013). Career-life preparedness: Revisiting career planning and adjustment in the new workplace. The Career Development Quarterly, 61(1), 2–14. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2161-0045.2013.00031.x

38.

Lent

R. W.

(2018). Future of work in the digital world: Preparing for instability and opportunity. The Career Development Quarterly, 66(3), 205–219. https://doi.org/10.1002/cdq.12143

39.

Lent

R. W.

(2025a). Career interventions in the digital age: Key challenges and transformative opportunities. The Counseling Psychologist, 53(4), 552–578. https://doi.org/10.1177/00110000251356280

40.

Lent

R. W.

(2025b). Choice architecture and the potential to nudge career development at scale. Journal of Career Assessment, 33(4), 716–738. https://doi.org/10.1177/10690727241298688

41.

Lent

R. W.

Brown

S. D.

(2006). On conceptualizing and assessing social cognitive constructs in career research: A measurement guide. Journal of Career Assessment, 14(1), 12–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/1069072705281364

42.

Lent

R. W.

Brown

S. D.

(2013). Social cognitive model of career self-management: Toward a unifying view of adaptive career behavior across the life span. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 60(4), 557–568. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0033446

43.

Lent

R. W.

Brown

S. D.

(2020). Career decision making, fast and slow: Toward an integrative model of intervention for sustainable career choice. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 120, Article 103448. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2020.103448

44.

Lent

R. W.

Brown

S. D.

(2021a). Career development and counseling: An introduction. In Brown

S. D.

Lent

R. W.

(Eds.), Career development and counseling: Putting theory and research to work (3rd ed.). Wiley.

45.

Lent

R. W.

Brown

S. D.

(2021b). Promoting satisfaction and effective performance at work. In Brown

S. D.

Lent

R. W.

(Eds.), Career development and counseling: Putting theory and research to work (3rd ed., pp. 733–767). Wiley.

46.

Lent

R. W.

Brown

S. D.

Hackett

(1994). Toward a unifying social cognitive theory of career and academic interest, choice, and performance. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 45(1), 79–122. [Monograph]. https://doi.org/10.1006/jvbe.1994.1027

47.

Lent

R. W.

Brown

S. D.

Wang

R. J.

Cygrymus

E. R.

Moturu

B. P.

(2024). Looking ahead, looking around, and looking to others: Identifying core proactive behaviors in the quest for career sustainability. Journal of Career Assessment, 32(3), 539–559. https://doi.org/10.1177/10690727231209777

48.

Lent

R. W.

Morris

T. R.

Wang

R. J.

Moturu

B. P.

Cygrymus

E. R.

Yeung

J. G.

(2022). Test of a social cognitive model of proactive career behavior. Journal of Career Assessment, 30(4), 756–775. https://doi.org/10.1177/10690727221080948

49.

Lent

R. W.

Sheu

Miller

M. J.

Cusick

M. E.

Penn

L. T.

Truong

N. N.

(2018). Predictors of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics choice options: A meta-analytic path analysis of the social-cognitive choice model by gender and race/ethnicity. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 65(1), 17–35. https://doi.org/10.1037/cou0000243

50.

Lent

R. W.

Wang

R. J.

Burrows

S. G.

Cygrymus

E. R.

(2026). Financial coping following job loss: Initial validation of a multidimensional measure and test of an expanded career self-management model. Unpublished manuscript.

51.

Lent

R. W.

Wang

R. J.

Cygrymus

E. R.

Moturu

B. P.

(2023). Navigating the multiple challenges of job loss: A career self-management perspective. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 146, Article 103927. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2023.103927

52.

Lim

R. H.

Lent

R. W.

Penn

L. T.

(2016). Prediction of job search intentions and behaviors: Testing the social cognitive model of career self-management. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 63(5), 594–603. https://doi.org/10.1037/cou0000154

53.

Lin

Leung

(2010). Differing effects of coping strategies on mental health during prolonged unemployment: A longitudinal analysis. Human Relations, 63(5), 637–665. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726709342930

54.

Liu

Wang

Liao

Shi

(2014). Self-regulation during job search: The opposing effects of employment self-efficacy and job search behavior self-efficacy. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(6), 1159–1172. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036692

55.

Maslow

A. H.

(1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054346

56.

Matani

Singh

(2025). Prospects in the field of career sustainability: Examining the past to forecast the future. Journal of Advances in Management Research, 1–42. https://doi.org/10.1108/jamr-05-2024-0158

57.

McKee-Ryan

Song

Wanberg

C. R.

Kinicki

A. J.

(2005). Psychological and physical well-being during unemployment: A meta-analytic study. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(1), 53–76. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.90.1.53

58.

Nauta

M. M.

(2021). Holland’s theory of vocational choice and adjustment. In Brown

S. D.

Lent

R. W.

(Eds.), Career development and counseling: Putting theory and research to work (3rd ed., pp. 61–93). Wiley.

59.

Okay-Somerville

Scholarios

(2015). Career Self-Management, perceived employability, and employment success during university-to-work transitions: A social cognitive career theory perspective. Human Resource Management/Zarzadzanie Zasobami Ludzkimi, 107(6), 33–60.

60.

Park

Lee

J. G.

Jeong

H. J.

Lim

M. S.

M. R.

(2022). How does the protean career attitude influence external employability? The roles of career resilience and proactive career behavior. Industrial and Commercial Training, 54(2), 317–332. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict-06-2021-0045

61.

Parker

S. K.

Collins

C. G.

(2010). Taking stock: Integrating and differentiating multiple proactive behaviors. Journal of Management, 36(3), 633–662. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206308321554

62.

Presbitero

Teng-Calleja

(2023). Job attitudes and career behaviors relating to employees' perceived incorporation of artificial intelligence in the workplace: A career self-management perspective. Personnel Review, 52(4), 1169–1187. https://doi.org/10.1108/pr-02-2021-0103

63.

Rudolph

C. W.

Lavigne

K. N.

Zacher

(2017). Career adaptability: A meta-analysis of relationships with measures of adaptivity, adapting responses, and adaptation results. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 98, 17–34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2016.09.002

64.

Russo

Zammitti

Zarbo

Magnano

Santisi

(2025). The sustainable career scale (SCS): Development, validity, reliability and invariance. Journal of Global Responsibility.

65.

Savickas

M. L.

(2021). Career construction theory and counseling model. In Brown

S. D.

Lent

R. W.

(Eds.), Career development and counseling: Putting theory and research to work (3rd ed., pp. 165–199). Wiley.

66.

Savickas

M. L.

Nota

Rossier

Dauwalder

J. P.

Duarte

M. E.

Guichard

Van Esbroeck

Van Vianen

A. E.

(2009). Life designing: A paradigm for career construction in the 21st century. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 75(3), 239–250. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2009.04.004

67.

Seibert

S. E.

Crant

J. M.

Kraimer

M. L.

(1999). Proactive personality and career success. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84(3), 416–427. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.84.3.416

68.

Sheu

Lent

R. W.

Brown

S. D.

Miller

M. J.

Hennessy

K. D.

Duffy

R. D.

(2010). Testing the choice model of social cognitive career theory across Holland themes: A meta-analytic path analysis. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 76(2), 252–264. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2009.10.015

69.

Solove

Fisher

G. G.

Kraiger

(2015). Coping with job loss and reemployment: A two-wave study. Journal of Business and Psychology, 30(3), 529–541. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-014-9380-7

70.

Söner

Duru

(2025). Developing and validating career sustainability scale: Sample of Turkish university students. BMC Psychology, 13(1), 954. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-025-03346-z

71.

Strauss

Griffin

M. A.

Parker

S. K.

(2012). Future work selves: How salient hoped-for identities motivate proactive career behaviors. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(3), 580–598. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026423

72.

Stremersch

Van Hoye

van Hooft

(2021). How to successfully manage the school-to-work transition: Integrating job search quality in the social cognitive model of career self-management. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 131, Article 103643. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2021.103643

73.

Swanson

J. L.

Schneider

(2021). The theory of work adjustment. In Brown

S. D.

Lent

R. W.

(Eds.), Career development and counseling: Putting theory and research to work (3rd ed., pp. 33–60): Wiley.

74.

Talluri

S. B.

Baruch

Donald

W. E.

(2025). Navigating sustainable careers: A conceptual framework on person-career fit dynamics. Journal of Vocational Behavior, Article 104157.

75.

United Nations . (2015). Transforming our world: The 2030 agenda for sustainable development. Retrieved from. https://sdgs.un.org/goals

76.

Van der Klink

J. J.

Bültmann

Burdorf

Schaufeli

W. B.

Zijlstra

F. R.

AbmaVan der Wilt

F. I. G. J.

(2016). Sustainable employability—definition, conceptualization, and implications: A perspective based on the capability approach. Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health, 42(1), 71–79. https://doi.org/10.5271/sjweh.3531

77.

Wang

R. J.

Lent

R. W.

(2024). The role of self-efficacy in coping with the psychological challenges of job loss: Application of the social cognitive career self-management model. Journal of Career Assessment, 32(4), 818–837. https://doi.org/10.1177/10690727241239946

78.

Wiernik

B. M.

Kostal

J. W.

(2019). Protean and boundaryless career orientations: A critical review and meta-analysis. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 66(3), 280–307. https://doi.org/10.1037/cou0000324

79.

World Economic Forum . (2025). The future of jobs report 2025. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/digest/

80.

Yang

Chau

(2016). Proactive personality and career success. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 31(2), 467–482. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmp-04-2014-0139

81.

Yang

Zhang

(2022). The chain mediating effect of network behavior and decision self‐efficacy between work skills and perceived employability based on social cognitive theory. Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, 2022(1), 5240947. https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/5240947

82.

Zheng

Mohd Puad

M. H.

Jalil

(2025). A scoping review of job search self-efficacy over the past 5 years: Antecedents, mechanisms, consequences, and future directions based on SCT/SCCT. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, Article 1596847. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1596847