ABSTRACT
A central issue for organizations is how to align the development needs of their employees with their own staffing and leadership requirements. The concept of the ‘career’ offers a useful means of exploring how this matching might best take place. The concept of career ‘has meaning to both the individual pursuing an occupation – the “internal career” – and the organization trying to set up a sensible developmental path for employees to follow throughout their working life in the organization – the “external career”’ (Schein 1978:1).
