Operationalizing Career Complexity

There are a growing number of studies describing developments in the labour market, in employer-employee relationships, and in individual careers in a very similar way. The discussion about work force flexibility and the challenges for HRM to handle scattered arrangements is often justified by a growing complexity caused by the driving forces of globalization, virtualization, demographic developments or changes in values. However, so far there is no empirical evidence for that complexity hypothesis in individual careers. The primary aim of this article is to approach the complexity hypothesis of career research on the basis of a sound definition for complexity and to test the complexity hypothesis for data from the Vienna Career Panel Project.