Companies are becoming more global and international, and commerce and information flow seamlessly across national borders. In addition, modernization, rapid technological change, an increasingly (shared) global culture, and shifting socio-demographic values have created conditions in which career stability is more threatened, while the importance of managing the career well is paramount. But, what do we know about careers in different contexts and how those career experiences vary in different regions and countries of the world?

The goal of this book is to develop new understandings of career from the vantage point of those who live in diverse cultures, and who belong to different generations.

Careers Around the World explores the very meaning of what a career for individuals is in different countries, cultures, professions and age groups. What does career success mean for people around the world? What are key career transitions, and how are they best managed in different cultures? As those questions have not yet been investigated in the literature of careers across cultures and generations, the authors have taken an approach that led to hearing the answers directly from working people around the globe. This book presents the answers to these questions from each of the seven major cultural regions of the world and the practical implications of these differences for those who manage human resources in organizations that cross national boundaries, as well as those who advise on careers.

Spain has a very diverse and intense heritage and a very long history that has led the country to have numerous distinct cultures and four official languages. In almost every aspect of society, family plays a vital and central feature in everyday life. The status of women may have transformed more in Spain than perhaps in any other country within Western Europe within the past fifty years. This chapter has three sections. In the first section, we present demographic data on women in Spain regarding educational achievement and workforce participation. Second, we address the presence of women in decision-making roles in politics and corporate management. In the third section we analyze existing challenges for professional women in Spain. Finally, we describe some recent legislative improvements and list the organizations in Spain that facilitate and encourage entrepreneurship for women. We propose a few recommendations on how companies and the Spanish government can become more accommodating to employees to create an environment for women to thrive and to achieve a more harmonized work-life balance.

Currently, fast changing working environments require leadership strategies for dealing with diversity and complexity in the context of cultural difference. Leaders who seek to be effective in working in this context, understand that they need to learn how to best engage and capitalize on the diversity of perspectives that arise in teams and other groups in which various cultural viewpoints find their voice. Leaders need to be aware that cultural dimensions affect leaders and their performance; that awareness allows them to address missed opportunities in which people fail to develop critical relationships because of their culturally limited perspectives. This chapter offers two strategies, cultural training and border crossing, that promote cultural competence and intelligence and help managers fill this missing gap in their leadership capacity.

This chapter advocates the concept of integration as a key concept for understanding work–life issues. Human life is a complex system, and as such, over the last decades, researchers have begun to realize that the various domains of an individual’s life interact with each other and must be studied in an integrated manner and within a common framework (Carlson and Kacmar, 2000). Consistent with this view, this chapter is concerned with harmonization of roles, diverse domain demands, and the dimensions that make up people’s lives. We advocate the need for integration and examine the ramifications of such integration, where integration is the person’s sense that his or her identity is a coherent whole, made up of various sub-identities related to specific life and career roles (Hall, 2002: 71–2). This chapter examines the difficulties of integrating career in life, especially in the first years of career development and takes a holistic view and a developmental approach of the individual; it views well-being and satisfaction of the individual as the main career outcomes.