Building Sustainable Careers

Career paths are no longer necessarily linear. People move between roles, organisations and sometimes professions, while their priorities, responsibilities and capabilities change throughout their working lives. Against this backdrop, building sustainable careers has become increasingly important for both employees and organisations.

A sustainable career enables people to remain happy, healthy and productive over time. It combines personal development with the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. For organisations, supporting sustainable career development contributes to employee wellbeing and creates a workforce that is better equipped to respond to the changing demands of work.

Why Sustainable Careers Matter in Today’s Workplace

The future of work requires people to adapt continuously. Technologies evolve, roles change and careers increasingly consist of different phases, transitions and experiences. At the same time, employees need to balance their professional ambitions with changing priorities and responsibilities outside work.

Sustainable careers recognise this reality. Rather than focusing solely on maintaining employment or progressing upwards, career sustainability is about enabling people to continue developing and contributing throughout different stages of their working lives.

Three outcomes are central to a sustainable career: happiness, health and productivity. Happiness relates to experiencing meaning and satisfaction in both work and life. Health refers to maintaining physical and mental wellbeing over time. Productivity reflects the ability to continue making a valuable contribution at work.

These outcomes are interconnected. A career that supports professional achievement but continually compromises a person’s health is unlikely to remain sustainable. At the same time, organisations need employees who can continue developing, adapting and performing as roles and workforce needs evolve. This makes sustainable careers relevant not only to individual wellbeing, but also to long-term employability and organisational resilience.

Exploring the Science Behind Sustainable Careers

Prof. Beatrice van der Heijden, Academy Associate at Zest for Work, has contributed to research on employability and sustainable careers since the early development of the field. Her 2005 work explored shared responsibility and employability-enhancing strategies throughout careers [4]. In 2015, together with Prof. Ans De Vos, she further developed the field through the Handbook of Research on Sustainable Careers [1]. In 2020, Van der Heijden, De Vos and Jos Akkermans published a scientific process model of sustainable careers [2].

Their work challenges traditional assumptions about careers as predictable, linear paths. Instead, a sustainable career develops through the interaction between the individual, their working environment and changes that take place over time.

For a career to remain Happy, Healthy and Productive, we therefore need to look beyond the job itself. Professional demands, opportunities for development, personal circumstances, health and life outside work all influence whether someone can continue to thrive in their career.

Key Dimensions of the Sustainable Careers Framework

The sustainable careers framework identifies three interconnected dimensions: person, context and time [2].

Person refers to the individual’s knowledge, skills, values, health, motivations and career aspirations. These influence what someone needs from their work and how they respond to career opportunities and challenges.

Context refers to the environment in which a career develops. This includes organisational culture, leadership, social support, job resources, employment practices and broader institutional factors such as retirement policies.

Time recognises that careers and lives evolve. What an employee needs at the beginning of their career may be very different from what they need when raising a family, caring for relatives, moving into leadership or approaching retirement.

Looking at these dimensions together helps organisations move beyond one-size-fits-all career policies. Sustainable career development requires an understanding of how people, workplaces and circumstances influence each other throughout a working life.

Science Calls It a Sustainable Career; We Call It Mutuality at Work

At Zest for Work, we describe the relationship behind sustainable careers as mutuality at work.

Employees and organisations both have a role to play in creating the conditions for people to remain happy, healthy and productive. Individuals need to take ownership of their wellbeing, development and career choices. Organisations, in turn, need to provide an environment in which employees have realistic opportunities to develop, recover, adapt and contribute.

This is not about transferring responsibility entirely to either side. Sustainable careers emerge through an ongoing interaction between what employees need and can contribute, and what the organisation requires and enables.

When that relationship works well, career development supports more than individual employability. It also strengthens workplace wellbeing, workforce adaptability and sustainable performance. When the relationship becomes unbalanced for long periods, both employees and organisations may experience the consequences through declining wellbeing, reduced engagement, loss of skills or unwanted turnover.

Blending Personal Responsibilities with Professional Aspirations

Career sustainability depends partly on whether people can respond to changes outside work without continuously compromising their professional lives. Responsibilities and priorities change over time, and organisations need enough flexibility to recognise these different career and life stages.

Real-World Implications

Employees may, for example, combine their work with caring responsibilities, parenthood or other major life events. These circumstances can temporarily change what someone needs from their job without reducing their long-term ability or ambition.

Supporting sustainable employability therefore means looking beyond immediate output. Flexibility, constructive conversations with managers and appropriate job resources can help people remain connected to their work while navigating demanding periods in their personal lives.

Examples of Career Sustainability in Practice

Sarah’s story. Sarah works in a support role at a university and needs time away from work to care for her elderly mother after surgery. Her professional responsibilities have not disappeared, but her personal circumstances have temporarily changed.

An understanding supervisor and flexible working arrangements allow Sarah to respond to both. Instead of forcing her to choose between work and caring responsibilities, the organisation creates space for a temporary adjustment.

Sarah’s situation illustrates an important aspect of career sustainability: what people need from work changes over time. Organisations that recognise these transitions are better positioned to support employee wellbeing while retaining valuable knowledge and experience.

Adapting Skills to Stay Employable Over Time

Sustainable careers are not only about responding to changes in people’s personal lives. They also require people to remain capable of responding to changes in their profession and workplace.

As technology, roles and business models evolve, sustainable employability increasingly depends on continuous learning and career adaptability. Employees need opportunities to develop relevant skills, while organisations need to recognise that learning itself requires time, energy and support.

Real-World Implications

Professional development is often added to an already demanding workload. Employees may be expected to learn new technologies, adjust to new ways of working and take greater ownership of their careers while continuing to meet existing performance expectations.

Sustainable career development therefore requires more than simply offering training. Employees need sufficient resources, opportunities and support to apply new knowledge and make meaningful career decisions.

For organisations undergoing workforce transformation, this creates a shared challenge. Developing career adaptability, sometimes also described as career agility, helps employees navigate change while giving organisations access to the skills and capabilities they need for the future.

Examples of Career Sustainability in Practice

James’s journey. James is a mid-career IT professional working in a field where skills and technologies evolve quickly. To remain effective in his role, he needs to continue developing his expertise. At the same time, he wants to spend meaningful time with his young children.

His organisation provides professional development opportunities as well as flexibility in how he organises his working hours. This gives James greater scope to invest in his employability without continually sacrificing responsibilities and priorities outside work.

James’s situation demonstrates why career adaptability is a shared responsibility. Individuals need to continue learning and adapting, but organisations also need to create realistic conditions in which that development can take place.

Together, Sarah’s and James’s stories illustrate two different sides of career sustainability. One involves adapting work to changing life circumstances. The other involves adapting skills to changing work circumstances. Both require an ongoing balance between individual needs and organisational demands.

Start Building a Happy, Healthy, and Productive Workforce

The Conservation of Resources (COR) theory provides another useful perspective on sustainable careers [3]. It describes how people seek to protect, maintain and build the resources that are important to them. In a work context, these resources can include energy, skills, supportive relationships and opportunities for development.

A sustainable approach to careers should therefore not continually deplete the resources employees need to function. It should also help people build the capabilities and resources required for future challenges.

This is where sustainable careers, employee wellbeing and sustainable performance come together. When employees are able to maintain their health, develop their capabilities and continue making a meaningful contribution, organisations are better equipped to retain knowledge, maintain productivity, respond to change and sustain performance over time.

The Organisational Benefits of Sustainable Careers

Sustainable careers matter to organisations because workforce sustainability depends on more than filling roles today. Organisations also need people who can remain capable, engaged and employable as circumstances change.

A strong approach to career sustainability supports long-term talent development and retention by giving employees opportunities to grow rather than forcing them to look elsewhere for their next step. It also supports productivity by helping employees maintain the health, energy and capabilities they need to perform over time.

For HR leaders, sustainable careers therefore sit at the intersection of employee wellbeing, talent management, learning and development, workforce adaptability and sustainable performance.

How HR Leaders Can Foster Sustainable Careers

• Encourage lifelong learning. Provide relevant development opportunities while recognising the additional time and energy that learning requires.
• Build career adaptability. Help employees develop the career management skills they need to navigate transitions, explore opportunities and sustain their employability over time.
• Support work-life integration. Create flexible policies and constructive management practices that recognise changing personal circumstances and life stages.
• Promote health and wellbeing. Support individual agency around meaning at work and in life, energy, resilience, physical and mental health, and career ownership.
• Model healthy leadership behaviours. Leaders influence how safe and realistic it feels for employees to manage their wellbeing and careers. By demonstrating healthy ways of working and taking ownership of their own development and wellbeing, leaders help create a culture in which sustainable performance is supported rather than simply expected.

Building sustainable careers is ultimately about recognising that neither people nor organisations remain static. The needs of employees change, jobs evolve and organisations transform. Creating the conditions in which people can continue to be happy, healthy and productive is therefore not a one-off intervention. It is an ongoing process of mutual adaptation.

References

1. De Vos, A., & Van der Heijden, B. I. J. M. (2015). Handbook of Research on Sustainable Careers.
2. De Vos, A., Van der Heijden, B. I. J. M., & Akkermans, J. (2020). Sustainable careers: Towards a conceptual model. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 117, 103196. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2018.06.011
3. Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American Psychologist, 44(3), 513–524.
4. Van der Heijden, B. I. J. M. (2005). “No one has ever promised you a rose garden”: On shared responsibility and employability enhancing strategies throughout careers. Open University of the Netherlands/Van Gorcum.