This qualitative study, derived from 36 interviews with refugees in Germany, contributes to the literature on career construction theory by exploring career adaptation in the context of forced migration. We focus on the complexity of refugees’ adaptive coping responses and study how refugees resort to and develop these adaptive responses in the host country. Our findings highlight the strong influence of context on refugees’ ability to adapt their careers, suggesting that problems in career construction are also contextually conditioned. Fundamental uncertainties, lacking personal resources, and having lost and losing time were overarching barriers. Restricted by the context’s unfamiliarity and these barriers, refugees’ coping was characterized by strong self-regulation. Many of them expressed concern and took control by disregarding uncertainties and set clear career goals and kept moving on regardless of the obstacles faced. They chose positive, appreciative mindsets to take control and strengthen their confidence, and shaped and explored their career dreams, thus exhibiting curiosity. Context not only impaired, but also facilitated refugees’ ability to adapt their careers through social connections and the richness of local work opportunities. The present study offers new insights into research on career construction by highlighting how context can impede individuals’ use of their adaptability resources and competences, and how despite difficulties, individuals can direct and actively shape their careers to re-build their work trajectories after the resettlement.

Introduction

Today’s ever-changing nature of work and careers have motivated scholars to re-think the patterns and processes that underlie individuals’ career construction. Besides traditional careers made up of work experiences orchestrated more or less agentically (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996; Super, 1957), millions of people face far more uncertain careers. Among these are over 22.5 million refugees1 ; people who have been forced to leave their countries because of persecution, war, or violence often connecting to questions of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social membership (UNHCR, 2018a). As refugees lose their homes and safety, they also lose their jobs and face disrupted career paths (e.g., Ivlevs & Veliziotis, 2018). Yet, little is known about their career construction. Refugees experience language barriers, unrecognized credentials, stigmatization, and low local social capital (Wehrle, Klehe, Kira, & Zikic, 2018) and, consequently, their career opportunities often fall starkly short from their aspirations (Pierce & Gibbons, 2012). This impairs job-search and reemployment (Yakushko, Backhaus, Watson, Ngaruiya, & Gonzalez, 2008), and results in a poor adaptation to the host countries. Nevertheless, refugees must – and do – construct their careers in host countries, and the aim of our qualitative study is to explore how they do that. Using career construction theory (Savickas, 2005; 2013) as an organizing framework, we aim at unraveling refugees’ attitudinal, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral adaptive coping responses after resettlement, and study how refugees resort to and develop their adapting behaviors when confronted with foreign and potentially restrictive contexts. By doing so, our research contributes to career construction theory (Savickas, 2005; 2013) by applying it to the context of discontinuous and involuntary career transitions (e.g., Haynie & Shepherd, 2011). Even though Savickas (2013, p. 157) has drawn attention to “destandardized [career] trajectories consisting of more frequent and less predictable occupational transitions”, empirical research on the construction of such careers is scant.