Dissatisfied and employed or satisfied and unemployed? The effect of individual and contextual conditions in shaping graduates’ early career

The career research is recently facing a rich literature debate about the (re)definition of the concept of career (see for example Rodrigues and Guest 2010, Sullivan and Baruch 2009, Tams and Arthur 2010). This debate is focused not only on searching for new career models, other than boundaryless and protean career, which have been the most influential in the last two decades, but also on questioning the strong emphasis on individual agency and free choice which the new career concepts assume (e.g. Khapova, Vinkenburg and Arnold 2009, Mayrhofer and Schneidhofer 2009). Indeed, as suggested from European career scholars, most literature on boundaryless and protean careers underestimates the importance of structural boundaries and the way in which institutions, such as labour market legislation, social rules and regulations, organizational policies, may influence career behaviours. Following this European critique on the careers models, the aim of this paper is to analyze the role of individual (agentic) and institutional (contextual) characteristics in determining young workers career choices. The empirical analysis is based on survey conducted on two comparable cohorts of business graduates of the University of Padova, who were interviewed 12 months after their graduation. The survey collects information on their early career development. The analyzed sample consisted of 229 graduates who were employed at the moment of the interview. Analyzing the willingness to search for another job even if employed, we found that the individual characteristics and attitudes play a central role in explaining graduates’ career behaviours: graduates who are dissatisfied with their job and who perceived to be overqualified are more likely to move. Even if with some structural limitations. Indeed, the changes in the Italian labour market conditions during two periods considered in the analysis (a decrease in the employment protection level and an increase in the number of graduates) influence the individual behaviours: graduates are more likely to leave their organizations when the labour market offers less protection and when the number of graduates is higher. The paper offers a general support to the literature which asserted the diffusion, on the last decade, of “new career models”. At the same time our findings suggest that macro-contextual variables (such as the labour market conditions and the institutional norms) have to be considered in order to interpret individual behaviours toward career mobility. These contextual characteristics play not only the role of “control variables”, such as a system of boundaries, but they interact with the agent’s characteristics shaping his perception of risks and opportunities.