Socio-cognitive aspects of career transition

Abstract

Career adaptability – a crucial contemporary meta-competency for navigating career changes and challenges – is vital in today’s rapidly evolving work environment. The Career Construction Model of Adaptation (CCMA) by Savickas and Porfeli (2012) provides a comprehensive framework for understanding how individuals manage their career paths. The CCMA emphasises the lifelong process of career construction, highlighting how personal characteristics, skills, and actions interact to influence successful career outcomes. The model is based on four key dimensions – adaptivity, adaptability, adapting, and adaptation, known as the “four As” – to examine the interrelationships between traits of flexibility (adaptivity), self-regulatory resources (adaptability), career behaviours (adapting), and outcomes (adaptation). Each dimension is further broken down into multiple subcomponents, ensuring the model’s flexibility and comprehensiveness. Despite its wide adoption in existing studies, the CCMA lacks a comprehensive measurement approach to fully capture the career construction process. Studies examining the serial relationships between its four dimensions often rely on a limited selection of constructs to represent each dimension. For example, individual studies may include only one or two constructs per dimension, which can fail to encompass the framework's multifaceted nature. Moreover, the variation in the choice of measures across studies leads to inconsistencies in how the dimensions are operationalised and interpreted, further limiting the comparability and generalizability of findings. Similarly, while the theoretical concept of CCMA highlights cognitive flexibility (CF) as a core executive function, alongside working memory (WM) and inhibitory control (IC), responsible for managing uncertainties in dynamic environments, most existing research relies on self-reported measures of CF. Although these self-reports are useful for capturing individuals' perceived abilities and willingness to adapt or embrace change, they overlook the underlying cognitive processes, such as the ability to shift attention between tasks or mental models. These processes, which are critical to CF, are better assessed using established cognitive tasks that offer a more objective and comprehensive evaluation of this construct. Three studies were conducted to 1) evaluate the underlying dimensions of the “four As” and their associations within the CCMA framework, 2) examine how CF influences the relationship between the “four As” and income among Singaporean working adults, and 3) assess the impact of CF on the relationship between the “four As” and academic achievement in Singaporean university students. To the author’s best knowledge, these questions have not been explored extensively in prior research. Study 1 confirmed the validity of the “four As” by extracting four common factors from diverse measures across samples and validating the serial mediation relationship in working professionals, thereby supporting the theoretical foundation of the CCMA. Study 2 revealed a positive relationship between CF and income. In addition, individuals with higher CF benefited more from improvements in adaptivity (e.g., enhancing one’s willingness to be proactive in career development), while those with lower CF gained more from focusing on adapting behaviours, such as engaging in job exploration and training. Study 3 found no significant association between CF and academic performance, although a positive relationship between WM and academic performance emerged. Specifically, higher adaptation scores were associated with better cumulative grade point average (CGPA) for students with lower WM, suggesting that career adaptation – such as beliefs in one’s employability, and having a clearer vocational identity – can help to mitigate the adverse effects of lower WM on academic performance. Overall, this thesis offers new insights into the career construction process by systematically evaluating the CCMA framework in two distinct populations, namely working professionals and university students. This is the first comprehensive effort to assess the CCMA, combining psychometric validation and exploring the relationships between cognitive functions and important real-life outcomes. This thesis leverages a multidisciplinary approach by incorporating cognitive science theories (i.e., the concepts of the core triad of executive functions) and methodologies (i.e., task-based cognitive functions metrics) alongside conventional organisational behavioural approaches using well-validated career framework and assessment instruments. These findings can inform individuals, organisations, and policymakers about the benefits of flexible thinking and career adaptability, contributing to training curricula that better prepare the future workforce for the ever-changing economy.