The New Career Contract: Developing the Whole Person at Midlife and Beyond

Abstract

This is an examination of the current status and future potential of older workers in organizational settings. This analysis will necessarily require a reexamination of traditional models of career stages, particularly in relation to issues of aging in the career context. The paper starts with an examination of the “career contract,” the set of mutual expectations between employer and employee and on the ways that contract has changed over the last decade. Our summary view of the new contract is that it reflects a move from an organizationally based career to a protean or self-based career. This change has particularly strong implications, positive and negative, for older workers, and these are explored in depth. We argue that the contemporary high-speed work environment demands two key competencies (which we call “meta-skills,” since they are skills for learning how to learn): identity development and heightened adaptability. The development of these meta-skills occurs through a process of midca- reer “routine-busting.” In our view, this suggests a new view of career stages, in which the focus is on many cycles of learning stages (continuous learning), rather than a single lifelong career stage cycle. The paper concludes with the implication of these new career concepts for the development of older workers, questioning the currently popular model of retraining and calling instead forcontinuous learningas a means of providing lifelong development for workers of all ages.