Career Design Vs Job Design

In this era of millennials, the world economy and job market has undergone tremendous changes owing to the massive technological advancements and globalization. As churning of jobs became a frequent affair, the traditional approach to jobs and careers was replaced and the nature of psychological contract between the organization and employees changed. People made several career choices focusing on how to remain employed or get new employment in this time of economic uncertainty. The aspects of job design were also getting noticed with attempts to devise better jobs with reduced turnover and increased productivity. In this scenario, Hall and Heras (2010) propose the idea of smart jobs through the combination of job design and career theory all

According to the authors, when people make career choices about accepting a job or exploring other avenues, they are essentially looking to fulfil certain job characteristics that cater to their psychological success which has long term career implications rather than just a particular job opportunity. Therefore, to design a smart job that makes an employee employable, one needs to address job characteristics related to metacompetencies, dimensions of Preferred Success Set (PSS), developmental network, protean career orientation, concept of possible selves, energy, meaningfulness of job and aspects of corporate social responsibility (to address social goals). I will be giving a comprehensive view of the above highlighted factors and how they can be incorporated in the job design of smart

Adaptability can be achieved in the case of self management teams as well as individual jobs, where there are minimal specifications, so that the individuals have autonomy in their decision latitude and an enhanced sense of responsibility for one’s actions. Although minimal specifications are not completely applicable for individual jobs, allowing a certain amount of autonomy especially in decision latitude regarding at least one or two aspects of the job can provide the individuals with opportunities on how to take actions and decisions in a self directed way based on the available information, which will help them to develop adaptability skills in the long run. Along with autonomy, assimilating frequent 360 degree feedback and organizing various training and learning seminars/programs that facilitate self reflection like mindfulness, can be helpful for developing the metacompetency of identity awareness. Depending upon the level and position of the employees, various levels of training programs and autonomy can be provided in the