Career Management Skills and the Older Workforce Looking for an existing model - and not finding one. Methodology - starting from the story. Approach similar to grounded theory - particularly looking for ‘critical instances’.

Career Management Skills and the Older Workforce Blueprint for Life/Work Design Emphasis on growth, improvement, exploration, developing understanding Striving v. settling Ambition v. evaluating priorities Take off or landing?

… a need for employees who can be self-developing, self-motivating and self- regulating. The ‘management of subjectivity … is now more than ever before the central task for organisations with employees actively wanting, thinking, feeling, doing and being subjects that are self-developed and whose personal objectives are congruent with the objectives of the organisation’. [Zemblyas, 2006, quoting Garrick and Usher, 2000]

Career Management Skills and the Older Workforce Critical instances: Time ‘I have better things to do at home’ ‘Life’s too short …’

Career Management Skills and the Older Workforce Critical instances: Work niches ‘Like a family’. A worker who could choose her work hours and conditions because she had been with the firm since start-up.

Career Management Skills and the Older Workforce Critical instances: learning, and selling yourself ‘I must have learnt because I knew how to do things’. ‘I have so much information in my head and in my life’.