ABSTRACT
The origins of the construct of career patterns stem from industrial sociology. It was initially described as the number, duration, and sequence of jobs in the work history of individuals (Savickas, 2001). Early examples of research on career patterns include Wilensky (1961), who identified orderly, borderline, disorderly, and one job only careers; and Kalleberg and Hudis (1979), who distinguished between stayers, occupation-only-movers, firm-only-movers, and both-movers. Although the existence of career patterns is largely undisputed in careers research, there is still no widely accepted definition and a lack of conceptual clarity. In this chapter, we thus first offer a working definition of career patterns. We then give a brief overview of methods that can be used to analyze career patterns before reviewing the existing literature on career patterns through different lenses. In this effort, we answer three related questions: what is the extent of empirical evidence about career patterns, what do career patterns “objectively” look like, and how are patterns typically measured and analyzed?
