Chance Events in Graduate Career Success: A Chaos Theory of Careers Perspective

Introduction

This chapter explores the nature of career chance events and their implications for understanding university graduates’ career success. Career chance events refer to “unplanned, accidental, or otherwise situational, unpredictable, or unintentional events or encounters that have an impact on career development and behaviour” (Rojewski, 1999, p. 269). The theoretical rationale behind this exploration is the increasingly more vocal critique of contemporary career theorizing and its overemphasis on the role of individual agency for career development and success (Inkson et al., 2012). Recent research building on this limitation has focused on understanding the career boundaries that impact careers and has shown the interplay between individual agency and structural constraints/enablers for career development (e.g., Ituma & Simpson, 2009; Okay-Somerville & Scholarios, 2014; Rodrigues et al., 2016). Although the role of unexpected, chance events has been acknowledged in career theory -especially those pertaining to career counselling (e.g., the Theory of Planned Happenstance (Krumboltz, 1998; Mitchell et al., 1999) and the Chaos Theory of Careers (Pryor & Bright, 2003a, 2003b)) - these have been largely left unexplored in discussions of graduate careers.

There is already some evidence, nevertheless, that chance events influence career-related exploration (Zikic & Hall, 2009), decision-making (e.g., the decision to pursue graduate education (Seibert, Kraimer, Holtom, & Pierotti, 2013)), entry into an occupation/profession (Bornat et al., 2011; Hart et al., 1971) and career self-management practices (Blanco & Golik, 2015). Hence, there is reason to expect, beyond anecdotal evidence, that chance events influence career-related behavior and outcomes, including graduate career development. Discussions of career adaptability (Klehe et al., 2012) and planned happenstance skills (Kim et al., 2014) both emphasize the importance of recognizing, creating and using chance events as opportunities. This suggests that chance events that one may not foresee and/or control could contribute meaningfully to graduate career development. The present paper explores the nature and implications of career chance events for understanding graduate career success.

Theoretically, this study builds on the Chaos Theory of Careers (Borg et al., 2006), which refers to careers from a dynamic systems approach and recognizes the complexity of careers. Building on this understanding, the chapter explores graduate career success at the intersection of career agency, structural boundaries of career development and chance events. In doing so, the chapter highlights the nonlinearity of contemporary graduate careers. The paper contributes to the evidence base on the taxonomy of career chance events and the Chaos Theory of Careers.