Career stage theory, as the name suggests, focuses on the status of an employee’s career rather than its nature. Regardless of how an employee identifies with his or her career, careers generally follow a life cycle. At the very least, all careers have a beginning, and what employees experience and need at the beginning of their careers is very similar. Career stage theory reflects a more traditional view of individual careers, and views a career as composed of four sequential steps.

Careers start in an exploration phase and end in a disengagement stage. In between, careers progress through establishment and maintenance stages. While people may experience career stages at different times, they generally progress through them, so knowing what to consider while in a particular one is valuable for an individual’s career development. Career theory may not be rocket science, but a rocket analogy is useful for understanding each of the four stages. Despite its name, in this analogy the exploration stage is equivalent to the countdown, and the employee is the astronaut.

Once individuals have committed to a specific career and learned what they need to be successful, they enter the establishment career stage. Continuing the rocket analogy, this is the person’s career blasting off. The maintenance stage is a period of uncertainty. In this stage, the initial KSAs and motivation that employees started their careers with has started to diminish. Obsolescence is the process of becoming obsolete—an especially strong concern for people in fields with rapidly advancing technology. For example, who wants a computer programmer who can only program in a language that is no longer used?

The best prevention is ongoing performance evaluations and a culture of lifelong learning that encourages and supports employees to maintain their KSAs and motivation. In a plateaued career, there is no longer an expectation of upward progression, which can lead to considerable stress for the plateaued employee. All good things must come to an end, and careers are no different. Ideally for employers, management knows when an employee has decided on leaving and can plan and prepare for the event. The proper final stage of a career is disengagement. Organizationally, having employees who are involved in disengagement represents a potential threat for management.