Globalization and Careers

The term career development represents a large body of theory and research that seeks to explain the structure and the development of career behavior, personal identity in work and other life roles, and factors that influence career decision making. Even though such a perspective on the functions of career development is accurate, it oversimplifies the complexity and the magnitude of the psychological and sociological content relevant to how individuals “construct” their careers across the life span. In particular, this perspective blurs the importance of the various political, economic, social, family, and other contextual factors that create the environments in which people choose, prepare for, and negotiate their work roles. Globalization is a contextual factor that is rapidly emerging in its power to shape the organization of work, how it is done, who does it, and where it is done.

Globalization tends to be at the center of what many scholars and journalists perceive to be a major shift in the nature of work and individual reactions to it. Indeed, globalization has spurred related language, including internationalization, international competition, global economy, and free trade zones (e.g., The European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement), which are all relevant terms. They collectively signal that most of the nations of the world are in transition—politically, economically, and socially—and that the factors that underlie these transitions have placed education, jobs, employment and unemployment, careers, and interventions in career development high on the policy agendas of many nations, including the United States. These terms are growing rapidly in international importance because the citizens of nations in transition are typically subjected to increased stress; deficits in information about their options, underemployment, and productivity; unemployment; inadequate education; decreased productivity; anxiety; and uncertainty and sometimes dread and apprehension. Edwin Herr, Stanley Cramer, and Spencer Niles wrote in 2004 that although the specific factors that affect the career development of persons differ from nation to nation, they tend to share some commonalities, as unemployment rates remain very high in many nations; many persons across the world are denied basic rights to jobs, education, or independent decision making because of gender, racial, ageism, and other forms of discrimination; and changes in access and adjustment to work processes and expectations are occurring in many settings around the world.

Among many other observers, Alvin Toffler, in his trilogy of books, Future Shock, The Third Wave, and PowerShift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century, has consistently addressed the acceleration of change as a function of new economic structures created by the emergence of information-rich knowledge societies, replacing agricultural and industrial societies in the United States and in many other parts of the world. A parallel period of change drove the rise of vocational guidance and vocational counseling at the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, as the United States moved from the agricultural era to the rapid changes spawned by the Industrial Revolution. Rapid changes are now spurring the refinement of and the search for new paradigms of career guidance, career counseling, and career services as a function of the transition from the industrial and manufacturing-dominated twentieth century to the “new economy” under way in the information-rich knowledge- and service-based global economic structure of the twenty-first century.

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