Whole-Life Career Self-Management: A Conceptual Framework

Contemporary careers require flexible career self-management across the life span that takes work and nonwork roles into account. However, existing models of career self-management do not focus on how work and nonwork life domains interact in this process and work-life research largely neglected a careers perspective. To address this issue, we present a new theoretical framework of career self-management that considers the intersection of work and nonwork roles. Our model integrates insights from career self-management, action regulation, and the work-nonwork interface to propose how goals, action plans, and behaviors across work and nonwork roles are dynamically linked and how these processes lead to career satisfaction, work-life balance, and psychological well-being, affected by contextual and personal role expectations and resources and barriers. Our framework has implications for the theoretical understanding of career self-management, the work-life interface, a whole-life perspective on career development, and contextual factors in career development across the life span.