キャリア・アンカーと仕事意識 : 技術者を中心に

The purpose of this paper is to show how one’s career anchor plays an important role in both an engineer’s career formation and work consciousness in an organization. We can consider “self-confident technical fields” as those which E. Shein called “career anchors.” We conducted a questionnaire survey to analyze the process of how engineers acquire “self-confident technical fields,” focusing on the early career stage just after entering the company until promotion to the managerial class. The informants used consisted of 3657 engineers from 63 large electronics companies. The important things that our research found out in terms of a company’s HRM policy and engineers career orientation are as follows. The first thing we should point out is trends in the firms’ human resource management system (HRM) reform. Nearly 90% of large electronic companies in Japan have introduced “performance oriented HRM” in order to motivate employees and maintain mutual consent in employment relations. Furthermore, many companies are committed to “inculcating the employees with companies policy,” “fitting employees behavior to corporate strategy,” and “maintaining long term human resource development” in future. Therefore, the second point we should make is that we must pay attention to the process in which engineers, as an important human resource, gain self-confident in a technical field. The result of our research clearly shows that engineers who gained self-confident in a technical field, in other words, engineers who have a career anchor, tend to get a higher job related competence, and their job performance is much better than engineers who do not have such a career anchor. Many engineers got their career anchor when they were in their early 30s. What this means is that, early career management including the first posting just after recruitment is very important in HRM. On the other hand, it is important to note that a career anchor has significance for an engineer’s career formation, but, unfortunately, not all engineers get one, because about one-third of engineers at the union level answered that they do not have a “self-confident technical field.” It goes without saying that it is a big problem for HRM policy to hold engineers who have no career anchor. Last, our research revealed that there are some critical gaps between the companies, HRM policies in future and the engineers, consciousness at the workplace level. About 70% or more of all engineers answered, “We do not have a suitable human resource development leader,” and “Our bosses are too busy to coach us,” and “We are too busy to train.” These research findings suggest a gap when we remember that HRM policy in the future stressed human resource development.