 So, welcome to the end of chapter 4 about performance and the conditions of change. In this final clip on chapter 4 I will dive into what change means to employees, in particular what change means to the careers of employees. So I am going to talk about dynamic careers. After this clip you will understand what dynamic careers are. So in order to end there I will start with defining careers and what career success means. I am going to introduce you to the theory of sponsors versus contested careers. I am going to talk a little bit about protein careers, about employability and I will end with flex security. So the question about who is responsible for making sure that employees are also benefiting from dynamic capabilities. So what are careers? Cures are literally patterns of work in subsequent or parallel jobs, sometimes interrupted by periods of non-employment in the time between labor market entry and retirement. So all the time from your first job, from your first side job until you stop working altogether, this is all the entire career that every person literally who is allowed to work goes through. Why do we want to talk about careers in a chapter which is about the business case for human research management, so literally from the organization's perspective if you remember. Well careers are in fact important to individuals because if you have a good job you will probably have a good income and you can support your family, you can do the things that you like, but careers are also indicative of society as a whole. So the more people who have a good career, the more wealth there is in society as a whole, the better the performance of organizations because employees with good careers are generally better educated and there are low unemployment costs. So careers are typically a domain which is the obvious beneficial to employees but there is also a payoff for organizations as well as societies. The career literature defines careers in different ways. You can define careers by looking at objective measures. So for example, just take a look at the picture. Somebody who has a successful career is probably better able to buy a house like that than somebody who has a less successful career, but you can also look at careers from the perspective of what does it mean to you, so more subjective. So for these two ways to define career success, objective measures can include your educational level that you achieve but also the income or how long you keep working in a healthy way. Objective career success is theorized in different ways and what is interesting to know from the literature is that it seems to be a debate between, on the one hand, people with the best careers, they probably had some help or people with the best careers, they are simply the best people. And the origins of that thinking, they can be traced back to Turner in the 1960s. So he posed himself the question to what kind of students made it to good careers. Was it literally the students who had the best grades in high school or were the students with a network, so they could benefit from access to higher ranks in society. And he called this the theory of contested versus sponsored careers. And this is important for human resource management because it has implications for how we can make a larger proportion of employees more successful over their careers. The contested career perspective, so the idea that the most qualified and skilled people will win the best careers that have been researched in a large meta analysis by Nguyen and Feldman. And they found that yes, indeed, so your level of education and also some personal skills, for example, the ability to use your networking skills or interpersonal skills being able to reach out to successful others that really helped to win, so to speak, a successful career. So that is to the individual implication, make sure that more people have good education and make sure that they're trained in networking skills that will help them forward. However, the sponsored career perspective puts it differently. They say the responsibility for successful career is not so much with the individual competences, so not the best employee or the best student, but the ones with the right connections. And they receive help from influential others. They will have the best careers. And the same meta analysis Nguyen and Feldman also found that there is access to career sponsorship, so having literally somebody who will help you find a nice opening to a nicer organization and having access to opportunities for training and development. These two things also contributed to better objective career outcomes. The access to career sponsorship and opportunities for training and development have HR implications. The sponsorship you can organize for people who are currently facing problems in making career process, offering mentorship, making sure that people are coached, and mentorship not just in the sense that you can do it, but in the sense that here's my networking. Please talk to this person. That is sponsorship. The opportunities for training and development, they are strikingly important in the context if you remember the flexible firm by Atkinson. The logic of many organizations is to invest in their core workers, so the ones that have a permanent contract with your organization, because an event that contributes to the organization's dynamic capabilities, a well-trained workforce, and it makes more sense to invest in people who are there to stay rather than in the flexible workforce. So what the risk is what's happening from the flexible firm is that there will be two categories of workers, one category who is invested in by the company, so they have opportunities for training and development, and the group that is worse off. They are in the flexible rank of the organization, and they are just repeating the same job over and over again, and not being trained of it. So not only don't they have a career advantage in the next step, but also their knowledge may lose its value when new developments come along. So these opportunities for training and development, they are under the sponsored career perspective for this reason. Employees by themselves are not responsible in a way to have opportunities for training and development. These are granted by willing employers, and employers in the end determine which employees have more opportunities for training and development than others. So if you can see from the correlations between each of these conditions for successful careers, you can say they are both true. You should remember this when we talk about how to help employees have successful careers that we will talk about in the last bit of this presentation. For now it's important to remember successful careers means investing in education, in network, in having a sponsor, so somebody who helps you to move your career forward and to have opportunities for training and development. In the 1970s, a new way of looking at careers developed. Before the 70s everything was focused on contributing to society, building a career, and success was literally the success that we discussed before, so having a hard job in an organization or being a doctor or being something important in society. In the Protein Career Movement initiated by Tony Hall was saying, well, maybe not all employees want to have a successful career, maybe success is something that is in the eyes of the beholder. You can be happily have a career and do nothing for a while, then be perfectly okay with that. So there was a changed mindset about how to what extent objective career success was really important to employees because work is just one of the things you do in your life. You also have friends, you have personal development, meaningfulness, so to what extent is career actually important? What is interesting to know is that this logic of the freedom to choose your own career path and the important value to employees, it has consequences for employers as well. So employers thinking about attracting employees to their organizations, they might remember that employees also value different things in a big salary and the prospects on career steps. In a figure, the Protein Career can be different from a traditional career. A traditional career is kind of linear, you start somewhere in the bottom of the organization, for example as a nurse, you move on to as a team leader and you end your career before retirement as the manager. However, in a Protein Career you can have multiple different, sometimes overlapping career trajectories, so you may start off as a nurse but then decide to do a side step and become a teacher maybe in a school and then move on maybe at some point to do something or do not something with your previous expectation and then after you had that experience you may think, oh maybe it's time for me to share my knowledge as a consultant about care in general. So a Protein Career has progress but it has hiccups and it's much more the choice of an individual rather than the choice of an organization or opportunities offered by an organization. There's a much larger do-it-yourself in a Protein Career. This brings me to the concept of employability. So no matter if you look at objective career success or subjective career success, the being able to find employment and to keep employment as long as you like it, this is a quality that is essential for employees to have in order to, you know, basically to have a living and to have a career at all. This employability has become more and more important since organizations have become more flexible. Before the entire flexibility of organizations was introduced, it was common just to have your entire career in one organization. Nowadays it's more the exception than the standard to work in your entire career in one organization. Rather, there are times where you probably have to look for another job outside the organization. Those moments, it matters to what extent you are employable or not. Employability is a combination of a couple of dimensions. First, it is about the radius which is the range of jobs and tasks that you can perform. So you can imagine the larger your employability radius, the more jobs you could apply for once the organization doesn't need you any longer, or once you yourself decide that it's time for something new, or once your organization reorganizes and you want to find a new position within the organization. Employability competencies, those are the resources that help individuals to broaden their employability radius. So all the skills, but also your network and your networking skills that help you to develop yourself and to enlarge your employability radius. And these two things are not the sole responsibility of a single worker. They are helped and hindered by things happening in their environment, and this is illustrated in the following figure. So research by Tyson in 1998, they did a big literature review and they found a lot of factors that related to employability of workers. So the opportunity to move from the current employability to future employability that all starts with the employability radius. However, the movement from the current employment to a future employment, there are also all kinds of conditions that facilitate the transition. For example, are your skills mobile from one organization to the other, or for example, if you have support by somebody or not? Furthermore, you can contribute to extend your employability radius and so to speak, your competencies to move forward by broadening the conditions, so your personal networking skills and the help from the company. So here you see the theory by turn are coming back into this model. There's on the one hand the employability competencies which are skills that employees can train on, doing education, the networking skills trainings, and there is support by others. So there is making sure that that employees get help moving from one position to another. This means that employability is a joint responsibility between employees, their employers, and also by society because the complicating factor in this entire model is the flexible firm. The flexible firm makes it difficult for organizations to invest in all their employees. There's a scarcity of means, there's not enough money maybe to train all employees. Flexible workers are the least of the concern to organizations that really have this flexible ring and they are therefore becoming less employable which has consequences for both the future workforce because they are not trained and not attractive new workers but they also might lead into unemployment at some point which is not good for society as a whole. So this poses the important question who is responsible to employee employability. Employability is kind of the fundamental condition that is needed for organization to be able to have dynamic capabilities because it assumes that there are always enough employees who can contribute to the flexible ranks of the organization and to the knowledge of the organization but it is also responsible for employees because if their employees are not employable they will end up in unemployment eventually. So this question about who is responsible employees or employers or both and how this is an important societal question and the last theory that I will introduce you with in this knowledge clip is the theory of flex security which is introduced by Tom Wildhagen in the 2000s some things. What this theory does is to make a connection between the needs of employers. Employers want flexible firms and the needs of employees to continuously invest in their knowledge and skills in order to be employable in the long term. And he came to the conclusion that in fact it's an illusion to expect from employers that a single employer will always train all their employees because they have this uncertainty if other employers will do the same thing and if you will do a lot and then you're training for your competitor in a way so that there's a existence in the side of the employers to fully, fullheartedly invest in the in the development of all the workers. Employees on the other hand they may feel insecurity particularly for income so to invest in in in their own training and they may not have the funds to do so. So according to Tom Wildhagen this is not a either or but an and and kind of question. In the end it's a labor market design question. If the society or the employers or whatever if a country decides that the flexible firm is there to stay then as a whole there should be policies that support the employment of that supports the flexibility of the organizations on the one hand and on the other hand supports stability and security of income on the side of the employers employees excuse me. So what is needed are laws that force employers to spend some of their budget in the training fund so if all employers do that then it's no longer the responsibility of a single employer to be responsible for training and this fund is accessible by employees who can use it to invest in their own skills and development and for example laws for employees that make employees who are in between jobs give them help to transit to make a transition from one job to the other and during this transition they can for example also do some education so there's lifelong education there's a enough money which is there funded by the employers because in the end a knowledgeable and employable workforce is beneficial for all employers and therefore for the society at large so in this clip I moved from careers to what employees like to being employable to the societal level even in a way to make sure that the entire society is showing this dynamic capability and to be productive and healthy and wealthy so wrapping up now you know at the end of chapter four that careers can be successful according to objective and subjective standards that objective career success is partly related to individual quality so contested and partly to getting some help sponsored that protean careers put individual interests and well-being central the employees have to invest in their skills and networks in order to be employable and that flex security or flex security theory argues that employability is the shared responsibility of employers employees and the government that's it for chapter four the next one will be on chapter five war for talent