Career transitions and employability

Abstract How individuals can be employable and make successful career transitions throughout their working life is gaining increased attention from scholars in the field of vocational and organizational psychology for several decades now. Although contemporary career literature implicitly or explicitly assumes a strong connectedness between career transitions and employability, these two concepts have their own historical development in the literature. In this paper we provide a historical account of how the research fields around both have evolved, and we highlight some key insights from seminal work. We then review the literature to explore in more detail how the relationship between career transitions and employability has been empirically studied in the vocational and organizational psychology literature so far. We end with discussing the major observations from this review and formulate pathways for future research.