ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a working definition of career patterns. It provides a brief overview of methods that can be used to analyze career patterns before reviewing the existing literature on career patterns through different lenses. The origins of the construct of career patterns stem from industrial sociology. Research on career patterns requires methods that allow for measuring and analyzing whole career trajectories over the life course, not just occupational states or career outcomes at specific points in time. Disparities between career patterns of men and women have been found in several studies: women frequently follow rather unstable, fragmented career patterns, and they also more often work part-time. Qualifying findings on the role of gender for career patterns, women were more career-oriented and less family-oriented; they were also more likely to have a continuous full-time working pattern. When reviewing available evidence on career patterns, it is apparent that multiple interacting factors influence the development of career patterns.
