Mass career customization: A sustainable solution?

Career customization provides employees with different options to customize their careers enabling them to meet their personal needs, as well as delivering a sustainable solution to the mismatch between today’s workplace and today’s workforce (Valcour et al., 2007). Mass Ca-reer Customization (MCC) (Benko & Weisberg, 2007) is an innovative career intervention that allows employees to customize their career development along a multidirectional path to align it with their changing needs over the lifespan. MCC was developed in a professional service firm (PSF) in the US to meet the growing number of employee requests for more flexibility. MCC promises to create a satisfactory career experience for employees and to prevent attrition in the war for talent.
As applied researchers, this article, allows us to share our insights on the implementa-tion of MCC in the subsidiary of the US firm in the Netherlands. We report on whether MCC is only window dressing, leading to stigmatization and career penalties when used, or whether it is genuinely beneficial for employees in different life stages. We also share lessons learned for the organization on this type of intervention and discuss practical recommendations for the conditions under which MCC can flourish in a PSF context as well as what we can learn for promoting sustainable careers in other organizational settings.