One’s career adaptability can provide valuable information regarding the quality of their life satisfaction and life meaning during important career transitions. To date, however, few studies have examined the dispositional antecedents of career adaptability and no studies have specifically explored whether these relationships operate similarly or differently across distinct groups of adult career transitioners. To address this gap, we had 298 young adults (i.e., college seniors or recent graduates poised to enter the workforce) and 169 older adults (i.e., workers who were either contemplating retirement or recently retired) complete measures of adult attachment orientations, career adaptability, life satisfaction, and life meaning. Results demonstrated that attachment security and career adaptability were associated in expected directions with, and explained unique variance in, each of our indicators of subjective well-being, and that career adaptability scores mediated observed relations between adult attachment insecurity and transitioners’ well-being. Exploratory analyses further showed that, for both groups of transitioners, career concern and control strategies emerged as significant mediators of these relationships. Future research directions and practical implications of our findings for counseling interventions with career transitioners are discussed.

Introduction

Over the years, vocational psychology research has advanced our understanding of career development processes. Theories and models of career transitions (Blustein, Phillips, Jobin-Davis, Finkelberg, & Roarke, 1997), of career development across the lifespan (Super, 1990), and of career construction (Savickas, 2002, 2005) have each highlighted how career development is either enhanced or constrained by the level of one’s career adaptability. For instance, Donald Super’s (1990) life-span, life-space approach theory viewed career development as a process whereby the occupational self-concept emerges and is progressively reformulated through mastery of distinct developmental tasks across several successive and major life/career stages. For Super, the optimal unfolding of this process was furthered by career adaptability, or one’s readiness to engage and cope with the tasks associated each life/career stage. Viewing career adaptability as a central element in his theory of career construction, Savickas (1997) similarly defined this construct as: The readiness to cope with the predictable tasks of preparing for and participating in the work role and with the unpredictable adjustments prompted by changes in work and working conditions (p. 254). Moreover, Savickas (2005) subsequently conceptualized career adaptability as reflecting a person’s readiness to deploy four adaptive strategies: concern, control, curiosity, and confidence. He defined concern as a person’s purposeful, proactive, and futureoriented consideration of their context of career-related decision-making. Control was defined as the belief that one is appropriately positioned and responsible for constructing a career, whereas curiosity embodied one’s openness to exploring his or her identity and career options. Lastly, confidence was defined as a person’s perceived efficacy in successfully implementing and executing a vocational plan. These strategies, both individually and collectively, are assumed to facilitate personal functioning and decision-making during normative career transitions by properly orienting one’s attentional, motivational, and behavioral engagement with the process of updating occupational self-concepts to meet the adaptive requirements of career development. The Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS; Savickas & Porfeli, 2012) was specifically designed to measure the level of one’s confidence in deploying these strategies. Since the construction and multi-national validation of the CAAS, researchers in different countries have linked higher CAAS scores to more favorable developmental and adjustment outcomes. Whereas career adaptability has been associated with positive psychological characteristics of optimism and resilience (Buyukgoze-Kavas, 2014), as well as with “proactive” personality traits (Cai et al., 2015; Johnston, 2016), CAAS scores have been shown to predict career adjustment and career engagement independent of global personality traits and core self-evaluations (Nilforooshan & Salimi, 2016; Zacher, 2014a) and to mediate the relationship between happiness orientations and work-related stress (Johnston, Luciano, Maggiori, Ruch, & Rossier, 2013).