Three Forces That Will Affect Your Career

When people think about their careers, most of the time they do so in terms of their preferences and their skills sets. But in reality, careers are subject to an overwhelmingly wide array of external factors like institutional regulations, the economy, and social networks that people would do well not to overlook when planning for their future or changing jobs.

Tracy Anderson, Assistant Professor at the Department of Management and Technology, Matthew Bidwell (Wharton School), and Forrest Briscoe (Penn State) looked at these external factors in a review published in the Routledge Companion to Career Studies. "Our goal is to outline and organize the many diverse external influences shaping careers, highlighting similarities and differences in these influences, and suggesting a framework for organizing and cumulating research in this broad domain," said Professor Anderson. Research on external factors shaping careers is multidisciplinary, spanning economics, industrial relations, management, psychology, and sociology. The review centers on articles published in the last 15 years in the major generalist journals for the disciplines listed above, as well as selected specialist journals that are especially relevant to careers. Anderson and her coauthors narrowed this swirl of forces into three distinct groups.

The first they call "institutional" forces, or the rules, regulations and social expectations that can influence career entry, training and advancement. These have been recognized by researchers as far back as the 1930s. Internal labor market (ILM) theory sought to explain the stable career trajectories inside of large companies in the 1950s before deregulation and the decline of unions lead to a decline of this influence from the 1980s. These pressures remain strong in law, medicine and education. An increasing body of work looks at how institutional factors influence the careers of men and women, and of different ethnicities, and how they lead to stratification and differential mobility.

A second set of forces comes from "ecological" pressures involving competition for resources, "which is relevant to the current crop of graduates entering the job market during the COVID-19 pandemic," says Anderson. These can be economy-wide influences, within sectors, or within organizations that shape the availability of career opportunities. "I think people are starting to understand the economic side a little bit more," she said. "People are now appreciating that in certain sectors careers might be impacted by economic change more than others."

Lastly are relational forces. An individual's career can be shaped by those to whom he or she is connected (including mentors or spouses). Social networks influence individuals' career choices as well as promotion. A body of work shows how interpersonal relationships shape individual career paths as a source of information or influence, but also sometimes as constraints.

Any real-world advice? "Be conscious of social expectations: if your career path is contrary to those expectations you need to be aware of that so you can dispel any detrimental signals that this may send to employers," she said.