Career Mediacy Competence: A Human Resource Development Perspective on Sustainable Careers

Abstract

Careers increasingly unfold across multiple roles and contexts, making it important to understand how professional identities become recognizable and career-relevant. This article introduces Career Mediacy Competence (CMC) as a developable, identity-based career competence through which individuals transform and valorize professional identities to strengthen legitimacy, access opportunities, and convert symbolic and relational resources into career value. The framework positions identity disposition and contextual conditions as shaping influences, and identity portfolio development as the foundational process for building coherent, mobilizable configurations of professional identities. CMC operates through two mutually reinforcing capabilities: identity transformation and identity valorization. Together, these capabilities support employability, subjective career success, and sustainable careers. Career outcomes may, in turn, enrich identity portfolios and inform subsequent cycles of transformation and valorization. By positioning HRD as an enabler of identity-based career development, the framework extends HRD career theory and offers practical guidance.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Human Resource Development Review, 2026 · DOI ↗