Customized Careers

Customized careers are unconventional patterns of workforce engagement by individuals who would [Page 221]ordinarily be expected to adhere to traditional career paths. Customized careers differ from traditional careers on one or more of the following three dimensions: work time (e.g., working reduced hours rather than full time), timing (e.g., late entry into the work-force or taking time out of the workforce in the middle of one's career rather than maintaining continuous employment), and type of employment relationship (e.g., independent-contracting work as opposed to long-term organizational employment). Related concepts include the boundaryless career and the protean career.

Customized careers are defined by their contrast to the traditional or “orderly” career, a pattern of work involving intense commitment to and continuous engagement with the occupational world, along with a striving for upward mobility and achievement of external markers of success. Traditional careers involve full-time, continuous involvement in the workforce, typically starting in one's 20s following the completion of formal education and ending with total and permanent withdrawal from the workforce some 40 or 50 years later at retirement. The traditional career template rests on the assumption of an “ideal worker,” for whom employment forms the basis of identity and work takes priority over other life domains. By contrast, the customized career assumes that personal identities are shaped by multiple life roles, including, but not limited to, work roles.

The customized-careers construct is most appropriately applied to employees who would ordinarily be expected to work on a full-time, highly involved, continuous basis throughout their working lives. Research on customized careers focuses primarily on managerial and professional occupations, which involve individuals for whom the traditional career pattern, with its strong emphasis on significant ongoing work involvement, constitutes a powerful cultural schema. Research on customized careers examines the work lives of individuals who choose to step off the traditional career track and craft careers that respond more precisely to their own and their families' needs and desires, even if this means rejecting the career expectations that are normative for their jobs, occupations, or organizations.