Dual Career Couples and Career Development Essays

Dual Career Couples and Career Development Essays Dual Career Couples and Career Development Paper Dual Career Couples and Career Development Paper DUAL CAREER COUPLES AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT, FAMILY AND REALLOCATION ISSUES SERVICES PROVIDED BY LARGE CORPORATIONS AND SMALL COMPANIES ABSTRACT As the dual career couples phenomenal increase rapidly in the global economy, large and small companies need to provide reliable services in order to alleviate the work-life challenges to support dual career couples in the complex issues they often faced. This paper will focus in the family career and reallocation issues of dual career couples and what are the approaches from large and small companies towards them. CONTENT 1. INTRODUCTION 2. LITERATURE REVIEW 2. 1. FAMILY CAREER ISSUES 2. 2. REALLOCATION ISSUES 3. CONCLUSIONS 4. REFERENCES 1. Introduction: Dual career couple is a common term used for marriages who both wife and husband have careers and work outside home. The challenges faced by these couples has been purpose of study for HR managers, as they are more complex that those that traditional couples face. In the last 30 years the number of dual-career couples has growth at a phenomenal rate. In mostly all developed countries as well in some of the third world countries, women represent half of the work force. The traditional figure of a family that only the man was the primary breadwinner while the woman stay home to take care of the children and the house was much more common before 1970 than today. According to a recent study of the US bureau of labor statistics, dual career marriages, which both partners are managers or professional, represent more of 80% of the US couples. Women has experimented an era of liberation and today are thought to pursuit career success, financial independence, self-sufficiency and plan a life having higher impact outside home. Women that graduated from college have more knowledge about the existing possibilities in their society. The dogma of the traditional family simply does not work among career couples, women that are better educated occupied professional and executive positions not because they have to, but because they want to. The desire for individual and combine success lead couples to restructure their marital roles changing the structure in the modern families. As the wife does not stay at home to do the housework the division of the home responsibilities is a must. The ideology of equality in marital roles emerges as a necessity to the eager of find common opportunities. Dual-career couples have to cope with different dilemmas of how to support each other’s career development together with the common responsibilities like childcare, housekeeping, and their personal relationship. These couples often have greater demands from the organization that employed them and be able to respond to these needs become a necessary priority for many companies. This essay pretends to explain what the challenges of dual career couples are and how those challenges are handle in large and small companies around the world. 2. Literature review Due to the exceptional increase of career families over the past three decades, dual career couples are bringing HR managers attention today more than ever. The study of the challenges of dual career couples and career development is a common topic in almost any human resource book. For methodological purpose this essay will be focus in two main topics: Family career issues and relocation issues. Comparing what are the strategies and the services provide for large and small organizations. 2. 1. Family Career issues For dual career couples with children, family issues may conflict with career progression. The employees not only need to be efficient at work but they also need to be competent and responsible with their family roles. The current competitive environment in business requires a lot of time, effort and work for professionals to develop their career successfully; this cause a lot of personal stress that is usually transfer from one partner to the other. When both partners seek to maximize their career development the family can be in serious conflict and under a lot of stress that become even more complex in couples with children or other family responsibilities. The job stress is linked to psychological well-being and this not only affects the individual worker but also his family. The strategies used to escape from a difficult situation and reduce emotional and physical reactions to stress are usually not just an individual effort; these strategies require help from the organization and from the family. As noted, the welfare of a spouse depends in part on the actions of the other partner. The dual-career families require concessions and understanding of family and business, which means a psychological commitment of the couple, with their family and personal relations, their individual careers and the organization. This type of families tend to solve their issues keeping in mind what is best for the family, over what is best as an individual. With the increase of married women in the work force, more companies have recognized the stressful situation of dual career couples and they have decided to incorporated more flexibility in their policies and personal selection, and in career planning, placement and promotions. 2. 2. The relocation issue We lived in an era of multinational companies and a large proportion of large companies hold under their portfolios several branches in different cities and countries. The knowledge of professional employees is converted into in a valuable asset for these companies and the relocation of key individuals turns into a common exercise for these corporations. In case of a relocation, the welfare of the employee’s family obey as an organization’s concern about how to recruit and retain the best employees. In many cases the services provide from the organization as support to the relocation is a vital factor for many employees to decided to accept or not a relocation. Many studies show that the main concerns of an employee that face a reallocation is the impact on his partner’s career. Is fundamental in dual career couples that faced reallocation to expect that the trailing spouse would be able to find a job and to continue the development of his or her career. This includes topics as work permits, job hunting and reallocation services. Large corporations have actively engaged in providing their employees with relocation services, especially when recruiting senior executive as many of them are unwilling to reallocate unless the accompanying spouse receives suitable employment assistance. These corporations created departments that assist the accompanying partners to find the proper job and successfully continue their career in the new location. Certainly most small companies do not have the resources to provide these services and results in a traumatic experience for the accompanying spouse or partner in a dual career couple to find a job. What translate in extra stress in their employees and could even lead in resignation. 3. Conclusions and Recommendations It is important that career development problems in dual career couples are recognized in the early stages when is still possible to make the corrections and if is possible should involve both partners in the planning even when one is not employed by the company. Large companies developed organizational policies related to their employees’ family as a key support factor for career families to cope with their challenges. This support is translated in the development of specialized centers within the organization to study dual career couple, career development and women at work. As well other policy to increase and improve their support like family days, flexible schedule, telecommuting, day-care services for children, feedback on their performance and in general any activity that could generate value from the organization to their employees. These types of organizational policies and services are expensive and many small companies cannot afford them. Large corporations have more specialized HR department and can allocate more resources to these projects and services. Small companies with limited financial resources cannot provide services as large corporation do. Also large corporations have more specialized work division and can reduce work burden on an employee if is necessary, in small corporation professionals tend to have many roles and the temporal absence of any employee cannot be easily compensate. Nevertheless is a must for small corporations to develop policies to support dual career couples. Small companies could take advantage of their close relation between shareholders and management team, getting to know much closer the challenges faced by its team and providing more focus solutions to those problems. Additional today many consulting companies provide services oriented to these employees problems and giving the opportunity to small companies to outsources those services. 4. References Books ? Mathis, R. , Jackson, J. , (2010) Human Resource Management. 13th edition. Cengage Learning. ? Sweet, S. , Moen, P. , Meiksins P,. (2007) Dual Earners in Double Jeopardy: Preparing for Job Loss in the New Risk Economy. Emerald Group Publishing Limited ? ? ? Hardill, I. , (2002) Gender, migration and the dual career household. Routledge Bohlander, G. Snell, S. , (2009) Managing Human Resources. Cengage Learning, Wolf-Wendel L. , Twombly, S. , Rice, S. , (2003) The two-body problem: dual-careercouple hiring policies in higher education. JHU Press ? ? Weihrich, H. , (2007) Management. Tata McGraw-Hill Education. Harris, H. , Brewster, C. , Sparrow, P,. (2003) International Human Resources Management. CIPD Publishig. ? Gilley, J. , Eggland, S. , Gilley, A. , (2002) Principles of Human Resource De velopment. 2nd edition. Basic Books. Ivancevich, J. (2009) Human Resource Management, 11th Edition. ?