Career patterns in entrepreneurial, occupational and leadership dimensions : optimal matching analysis with multiple job roles

Abstract

This present study analyses the career patterns of a sample of 2916 individuals drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) by characterizing their careers as consisting of job roles unfolding in entrepreneurial, occupational and leadership dimensions i.e., our coding allows individuals to hold singular job roles (e.g., Professional only or Entrepreneur only or Manager only) or multiple job roles (e.g., Professional-Managerial or Entrepreneurial-Professional) at certain points of their careers. We identified five broad career patterns, labelled as mid- professional, late-professional, persistent-professional, persistent-vocational and entrepreneurial career patterns. We also examined the antecedents and consequences of adopting the distinctive career patterns and found that individual and social hierarchy attributes play an important role in career pattern adoptions. Significant differences were also observed in the levels of objective career success across the identified career patterns. Contributions to the broader careers, entrepreneurship and human capital literatures are discussed.