I am not that woman anymore... reinventing life with career crafting

Abstract

Gender roles are not innate; they are acquired. Butler (1990, p.33) upheld that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that is open to intervention and re-signification. This research examined this process of becoming with regard to reinvention of career and life; inspired from my own experience of rediscovering myself. After a challenging life, I left India in 2012 to pursue my second PhD in New Zealand. As a researcher, my quest was to develop career crafting framework that can guide women in reinventing their careers to achieve personal success. Hence, with the key objective of testing the new concept of career crafting and with a focus on gender, this qualitative study examined career progression of 36 accounting professionals in New Zealand. Drawing on the in-depth interviews, thematic analysis led to the new paradigm of career crafting involving cognitive, relational and task crafting to understand how women achieved career success. This research focused on individual agency while acknowledging that external factors play a vital role in the shaping of career pathways, either by offering support and facilitating growth, or by creating and imposing constraints. The central principle is individuals can utilize invention strategy to create new opportunities or adaptation strategy to mitigate the negative impact of an adverse situation. With career crafting, participant women gained career success by garnering family and organizational support within and outside of the box. The eventual outcome of career crafting is that it helps women redefine their possible selves and build capabilities to achieve personal success. While this study focused on the accounting profession, the awareness of career crafting practices would benefit women in general to chart their life pathways. For example, my daughter has validated the model by using it for her engineering career successfully.