Emotional processes in career adaptation: A longitudinal study in an adult education program

Parmentier, Michaël [UCL] Pirsoul, Thomas [UCL] Nils, Frédéric [UCL]

In today’s global work context, the ability to cope with the unpredictability of ongoing changes and job transitions has become crucial, both at the emotional and cognitive level. Individuals are expected to continuously develop their skills to improve their employability (Baruch, 2004) and display both emotional competence/intelligence (Di Fabio & Kenny, 2014) and career adapt-abilities (Savickas, 2005) in order to respond to career changes. Even though the concept of career adaptability has been coined as a key construct in vocational psychology and extensively studied in recent years (see, Rudolph, Lavigne, and Zacher 2017, for a meta- analysis), the literature has been less specific regarding (1) the interplay between adult education and career adaptation and (2) the importance of the emotional processes at play (Hartung, 2011). Within the context of an adult education program, the present study investigates the impact of emotional competence/intelligence on career adaptability and several professional development and work outcomes, i.e., self-perceived employability, job burnout, and positive and negative affect. More precisely, we hypothesized that career adaptability mediates the impact of emotional competence on self-perceived employability, job burnout and positive and negative affect. The data will be collected in a 5-wave repeated-measures longitudinal design in a university adult education program. Using path analysis, cross-sectional results of wave 1 demonstrated a satisfactory fit of our tested model with the data (χ²(6) = 16.9, CFI = .94, RMSEA = .08). Furthermore, using bootstrap estimation (10,000 samples), our results showed that career adaptability mediated the impact of emotional competence on self- perceived employability, positive affect, negative affect and burnout. Results of the first wave and the overall research design will be presented on the poster. At the theoretical level, this study contributes to the growing literature on career adaptability and offers needed longitudinal evidence of the career construction model (Rudolph et al., 2017). At the practical level, this study stresses the importance of emotional and adaptation processes for lifelong learning and adult education.