Alone, together? Towards an Ecosystemic Approach to the Career Sustainability of Skilled Contingent Workers

Contemporary changes in the world of work have led to radical transformations in employment relationships, in the type of working arrangements, and in the way workers enact their careers. Notably, there has been a significant increase in the number of contingent work arrangements over the past decades. Nowadays, contingent workers are most often part of triangular employment relationships, and follow non-organisational careers. In this PhD thesis, I focus on Skilled Contingent Workers (SCWs) –freelancers and consulting firm employees– who engage in project(s) for client companies as external workers, for a specific period of time, as long as they are needed on the proper running of the project(s). Such workers are expected to face complex and peripatetic paths, less likely to become sustainable than employees’ ones, as they may strongly face transient and unpredictable careers, and less secure employment relationship over time. In addition, they are in most cases excluded from many types of formal organisational career management strategies. In this line, how do SCWs develop career sustainability within their specific career ecosystem? This PhD thesis is structured around three papers, and a discussion that provides substantial information and uniform insights to this question.
Data collection from SCWs and client organisations who resort to these workers shows that they enact various career sustainability strategies to navigate within their complex career ecosystem. Findings reveal that their career ecosystem is constituted of four main stakeholders: certification bodies, labour market intermediaries, professional associations and networks, and client companies. Such stakeholders help them make progress in their careers, through the provision of career resources, support and management. In this manuscript, SCWs’ career strategies are, in fine, considered in light of the career script framework, which posits that careers are influenced and shaped by the different stakeholders of SCWs’ ecosystem, and are also enacted by individual career management strategies, following a two-flow interconnected process. Through this complex interplay, and beyond purely agentic career strategies, SCWs’ stakeholders have the power to support them in moving towards greater career sustainability. I thus reveal the importance of SCWs’ context in developing career sustainability.