'Career Crafting': How skilled migrants construct flexible careers in the host country

Abstract This paper examines the careers of skilled migrant workers through the concept of ‘career crafting’. Drawing on analysis from detailed narrative interviews and exploiting aspects of the concepts of ‘job... [ view full abstract ]

Abstract
This paper examines the careers of skilled migrant workers through the concept of ‘career crafting’. Drawing on analysis from detailed narrative interviews and exploiting aspects of the concepts of ‘job crafting’ and ‘career construction’, the paper develops a concept that we term ‘career crafting’. We utilise this concept to explore how skilled migrants ‘craft’ and how, by making sense of the choices they make, they legitimatize their host country careers, which they have constructed as a dynamic flexible response to the unfolding career priorities they encounter over the life course. Adopting a social constructivist perspective, with a holistic view of career, the study embraces the context of the migrant’s career (the host country) and utilizes the migrant’s sense making to capture their subjective perception of their career and world. The research contributes to career research by combining aspects of ‘job crafting’ and ‘career construction’ theory to create a holistic framework with which to explore and unpack factors, expressed during interviews, which influence the skilled migrants’ career perspectives. This study provides an alternative explanation to the career flexibility of skilled migrants, setting out their agential choices, and how they rationalize their career decisions and outcomes, such as externally perceived under-employment.
 
Introduction
The 21st. century world of work is becoming increasingly dynamic, complex and mobile (Grier-Reed and Conkel-Ziebell, 2009), leading to a growing need for new career perspectives and concepts to understand and unpack today’s contemporary careers (Savickas et al., 2009). This remodelling of work patterns has made the world of careers increasingly difficult to comprehend with the extant person-environment and vocational development models (Savickas et al., 2009), which lack the nuances for the study of contemporary careers. The person-environment and vocational development models (Savickas et al., 2009) emphasize traits such dedication and loyalty, rather than the prominent contemporary career traits, such as flexibility and mobility (Savickas, 2006a).
Parallel to this career remodelling, international careers have also increased (Bahn, 2015, Guo and Al Ariss, 2015), and this increased worker mobility has resulted in skilled migration becoming a permanent feature of national and international economies (Connell and Burgess, 2009). The rapid growth of various advanced industries has led to a skills shortage in many developed countries, encouraging a talent flow of skilled migrant workers to fill these skills gaps (Bahn, 2015). In conjunction with this increased worker mobility, there has been a corresponding increase in academic interest in this area (Andresen et al., 2014, Cross and Turner, 2012). Yet, at the micro level, we still know very little about the careers and motivations of skilled migrants (Zikic et al., 2010).
In adapting aspects of job crafting (Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2001) and career construction (Savickas, 2013b, Savickas, 2006a, Savickas, 2011) to develop the concept of ‘career crafting’, this study will address the previously mentioned issues with studying both contemporary (extant career concepts lack the necessary nuances) and skilled migrant careers (dearth in micro level research). ‘Career crafting’, as a process engaged in by skilled migrants, is shown as a means by which skilled migrants make sense (Weick, 1995, Weick et al., 2005) of their career over the life stage. ‘Career crafting’ explains how skilled migrants make sense of and construct their career and identity in the host country over time. It offers a deeper understanding of the varied career influences, factors, paths, and outcomes associated with skilled migrant careers (Gunz and Mayrhofer, 2007), which are dynamic and change in priority over the life stage of the individual.
There also exists a relative research lacuna on ‘holistic understanding of careers as embedded in family, personal, and community life’ (Lee et al., 2011, p.1535). By developing and utilizing the concept ‘career crafting’ this research offers a holistic and boundary spanning study that adopts a ‘whole life’ perspective on career, a perspective which encompasses both work and non-work experiences (Briscoe et al., 2006).
The study contributes to career theory and international career research in a number of ways. First, it proposes the concept of ‘career crafting’ as a research conduit through which to access and unpack contemporary careers, which we argue are inherently flexible in nature. Flexible, in our analysis, refers to the agential actions which skilled migrants consciously undertake to accommodate their work and non-work lives over the course of their lives in the host country. Second, the paper addresses the dearth of micro level research on the career construction of skilled migrants (Zikic et al., 2010). Drawing on the epistemological approach of social constructivism, this exploration of skilled migrants’ careers, adopts the view that the interactions of the skilled migrant and the varied career influences and outcomes associated with skilled migrant careers (Gunz and Mayrhofer, 2007) result in the ‘crafting’ (constructing) of the meanings of careers and career success for the skilled migrants. Third, by sharing and unpacking factors, expressed by the interviewees, which influence skilled migrants’ career perspectives, the study examines how the skilled migrants sample rationalize their externally perceived career outcomes, adding to the research on how skilled migrants make sense of their career and identity in the host country. At this juncture it is important to note that, while we draw on data from our interviews, this is not an empirical paper on findings from the interviews, but a paper designed to illustrate the development and utilization of the conceptual model, ‘career crafting’. Finally, the paper provides an alternative explanation to the phenomenon of ‘underemployment’, setting out the agential choices made by skilled migrants in the pursuance of their inherently flexible careers, through detailed analysis of their career narratives from a sense-making approach (Weick, 1995, Weick et al., 2005).

Keywords Career crafting, sense making, careers; skilled migrants, subjective success. [ view full abstract ]

Keywords
Career crafting, sense making, careers; skilled migrants, subjective success.