The Sustainability of Reskilling Projects Based on Employees’ Readiness for a Career Shift: Pursuing Sustainable Careers by Transitioning into IT Professions

Vladimir Obradović (), Ivana Kovačević, Ivana Kužet () and Mateja Manojlović
Additional contact information
Vladimir Obradović: Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia
Ivana Kovačević: Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia
Ivana Kužet: Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia
Mateja Manojlović: Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia

Sustainability, 2024, vol. 16, issue 2, 1-18

Abstract: Today’s organizations are highly responsive to external changes, which they also demand from their employees. All employees need competencies to respond to Industry 4.0, the green business economy, and post-COVID-19 work circumstances and to manage sustainable careers. One way of doing so is to take active part in reskilling projects and be ready for a career shift, which we believe can be foreseen in people’s devotion to sustainable careers and can ensure the sustainability of the whole reskilling project. With the presumption that the concept of sustainable careers can be captured in terms of the concept of readiness for a career shift, this study aims to explore the potential of the scale of readiness for career shifts to predict participants’ success in reskilling projects (in the context of IT professions). The research was conducted on 336 candidates who applied for Java and PHP programming positions and had no previous knowledge or experience in the field. The results show that the scale of readiness for career shifts has acceptable metric characteristics, and canonical discriminant analysis confirmed that the overall score can be used to predict outcomes in the reskilling project, while predictions based on single indicators were rather ambiguous. Therefore, the scale can be used as a tool in the process of selecting reskilling candidates (at least in professional transitions in the domain of IT), but further research on the topic might shed more light on the concept.

Keywords: sustainable career; sustainable reskilling project; readiness for a career shift (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/2/709/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/2/709/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:16:y:2024:i:2:p:709-:d:1318693

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().