Capturing the Diversity of Transition from a Multidisciplinary Perspective

The broad utility of the concept of transition in many disciplines provides career educators and career advisory personnel with expanded opportunities to explore fresh solutions to problems they meet in the course of their work. Further practical solutions become available by continuing to seek applications of the concept. Career transition focuses on contingencies and particular events in individual or organisational circumstances but career change also invokes the generic idea of transition. This article inspects two widely used career transition models: those of Bridges and Schlossberg. It then positions these models by identifying wide cross-disciplinary use of the transition concept, including in social science. Drawing on this richness the idea of transition may be simply used as the context of career discussion or, as suggested here, it may be more consciously and actively mined to respond to career development opportunities.