Identifying predictors of career success is one of the most considered topics in career research and practice. However, the existing literature suggests a vast array of potential predictors that cannot be economically measured. This significantly limits research and practice. To address this issue, we have integrated theoretical and meta-analytic research to propose an integrative framework of career resources, including human capital, environmental, motivational, and career management behavior resources represented by 13 distinct factors. In a multistep process, we have developed the career resources questionnaire to assess these factors in workers and college students. In two studies encompassing 873 workers and 691 students, we have confirmed reliability and factor structure, convergent validity with existing scales, and criterion validity with indicators of subjective and objective career success. The developed measure can provide researchers and practitioners with a reliable, concise, and comprehensive measure to assess the key predictors of career success.

Ageing research calls for a focus on the mechanisms that can explain effects of ageing beyond the purely chronologic marker of age. To address this issue, the present study focuses on subjective age as a holistic construct that is related to various developmental and motivational processes and allows deeper insights into the interindividual variability of the ageing experience in older workers. Specifically, the current study examines on a sample of N = 485 late career employees (mean age 54 years), if subjective age is related to job crafting behaviours of older workers and whether job crafting is related to higher levels of work meaningfulness in late career. Results indicate that subjective age is significantly negatively related to job crafting behaviour over and above the effect of chronological age, self-rated health and workplace autonomy. Job crafting, in turn, significantly predicted work meaningfulness, above the effect of workplace autonomy. In sum, our study provides evidence for the utility of psychological representations of ageing to understand job crafting at work for an increasingly important segment of the working population.

Subjective age research is on the rise, and the term has become an overarching way of describing how individuals idiosyncratically experience the aging process (“How old one feels”). Furthermore, the theory of aged heterogeneity posits that interindividual variability of similarly aged adults increases over time, suggesting that subjective age may become more variable in later life. Subjective aging has usually been investigated in a variable-centered manner—which over-assumes homogeneity among people’s aging experience—producing mixed evidence regarding the utility of single subjective age constructs in different populations. Person-centered approaches, in contrast, acknowledge interindividual heterogeneity in the aging experience, providing an alternative angle of investigation, and enable insights into how variables operate conjointly within persons. Therefore, the current research uses a latent profile analysis to investigate various conceptualizations of subjective age among late-career employees. Using a time-lagged design with a sample of 229 older workers (aged 50–66 years), we uncover three distinct subjective age profiles: Youthfuls, Matures, and Veterans. Moreover, we investigate how person-related correlates of subjective aging differ between the uncovered profiles, and how, in turn, these profiles are related to work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior. Through a person-centered approach, we receive valuable insights on the concurrent interplay of various subjective age concepts in a highly heterogeneous population and provide a better understanding of subjective age in late career.