The Protean Career
Introducing the Protean Career
The gig economy emerged as a result of rapid technological advancement and globalization. Several career transitions sprouted as remote work became more available and people grew interested in flexible work arrangements. Among these transitions, boundaryless and protean careers have gained special attention over the past years.
The boundaryless career primarily focuses on the mobility between a succession of jobs, each separate from a single work organization. The protean career is another concept among the evolving nature of employment in contemporary work environments. While protean careers also steer away from traditional career paths, they focus more on the individual’s self-directed pursuit of personal and professional goals. Individuals who follow a protean career guide themselves with their intrinsic values, interests, and passions rather than linear career paths and external expectations.
Elements of the Protean Career
By definition, the protean career is independent from an organizational structure. The onus to manage one’s career relies solely on the self. With this volition, the worker has the agency to pursue the professional path that best aligns with their psychological ideas of success. Thus, a person who partakes in a protean career has a subjective perception of success. It is unique to the worker because it is based on their intrinsic values and goals. Subjective success can take the form of job satisfaction, life fulfillment, psychological well-being, and perceived employability.
Subjective success is in contrast to objective success, often defined by extrinsic standards such as organizational norms. Those in traditional work arrangements are likely to have goals that reflect their organization’s reward system. For example, suppose you are working at a company that rewards the top performers with a paid vacation. In that case, your idea of success will be molded to fit the organization’s offerings. As a result, a traditional worker’s definition of career success may resemble a promotion, larger office, and/or salary increase.
To gain subjective success with a protean career, three characteristics are essential:
- Identity awareness
- Adaptability
- Career agency
People who practice a protean career exhibit various advantages: greater work satisfaction, engagement, and performance. Protean careerists experience an increase in their well-being, and have an overall sense of autonomy and empowerment. However, individuals must exhibit great identity awareness to obtain these advantages of a protean career. This means constant reflection on strengths, weaknesses, career management tendencies, gravitation towards certain tasks, client feedback, and ability to develop their career. Compared to a traditional career (i.e., a 9 to 5 office job), a protean career is unpredictable and subject to moving in different directions. For this reason, protean careerists must have an internal compass guiding them to actualize their goals. With this realization comes a sense of clarity that fuels a worker’s pursuit of a deeper purpose.
People who take on this career structure need to have high adaptability, or the competency to adjust, evolve, and thrive in the face of changing circumstances and career expectations. Protean professionals encounter diverse and evolving work environments as they enter new contracts. This continuous learning demands an adaptive mindset to acquire and apply new skills. Moreover, individuals in protean careers can redefine their job roles to align with personal values, necessitating openness to unconventional career trajectories.
Lastly, a protean worker must have agentic qualities, which is the sense of control over their career. Agency is measured by the strategies used to actively shape one’s career and secure an increased level of work engagement as a result. As workers gain agency, they redefine and reconfigure their work arrangements to achieve greater fulfillment and alignment with their evolving aspirations. Having agency is the driving force behind the protean career, enabling individuals to navigate the complexities of the modern work landscape, embrace continuous learning, and forge a unique and personally meaningful professional journey.
Freelancing as a Protean Career
Freelancers are often thought of as protean careerists due to their resembling qualifications. Freelancers typically perform contract-based projects and offer short-term services independent from any organization. This represents a protean career because of the following aspects: “learning how to learn,” career identity, adaptability, motivated by intrinsic values, and self direction. Additionally, studies show that freelancers who orient their career identity with their personal identity are better able to seek jobs that are best fit for them and deliver stronger narratives of unique career journeys to new potential clients.
Freelancers who take on the protean career orientation are likely to experience occupational embeddedness — the forces that cement a person in their career field. For example, the compatibility between the freelancer’s interests and their career– there is no motivation to stray from their career when it fulfills freelancer’s desires. Second, the longer a freelancer has pursued the occupation, the more networks and relationships they have developed. With these strong connections, they are exposed to a flow of specific jobs. Lastly, pursuing a different career is viewed as a sacrifice and ultimately diminishes their perceived employability, or the individual’s subjective belief regarding their ability to gain and maintain employment. Freelancers who operate on a platform, which acts as a third party for connecting the freelancer to the client (i.e., Upwork), may experience platform embeddedness. Platforms can systematically keep people on their platform by requiring interactions to stay on the site and providing platform-specific incentives and metrics, ultimately adding another layer of embeddedness.
Freelancers across career stages
The protean freelancers undergo a unique life cycle compared to traditional careers and other career transitions. Traditional career trajectories may resemble a bell curve or a straight progressing line. Contrasting to operating on a single life cycle, freelancers participate in a continuous pattern of mini cycles of learning. Each individual cycle consists of four stages: exploration, trial, mastery, and exit.
- Exploration involves the job search for a freelancer’s next project. This is the time for heightened self-awareness of one’s assets, weaknesses, and goals, as this serves as an opportunity to learn new skills and build their portfolio.
- After choosing a path and landing a contract with a client, the next stage (trial) calls for a necessity to learn new skills. Every project a freelancer takes on will encompass niche demands. Freelancers must use their resourceful and adaptable characteristics to successfully complete the task.
- The next stage, mastery, is when the freelancer gains an increased awareness of their work. They evaluate what they are learning and search for more opportunities for gains.
- Lastly, the freelancers enter the exit stage. The freelancers must unlearn the specific skills needed for that job, as it will no longer be applicable to their future projects. They simultaneously anticipate relearning as they prepare to enter a new contract. The exit stage is accompanied by objective rewards (financial compensation) and an increased sense of perceived employability.
The contract-based nature of the work allows for this repetition, with subjective success and intrinsic rewards present in all four stages. The rise in protean careers is due to the increased accessibility being granted in the form of digital marketplaces and remote gig work.
A special thanks to : Clea O’Neil, Isabel Munoz, and Pyeonghwa Kim for thier edits.
