Prospects in the field of career sustainability: examining the past to forecast the future

Purpose The study aims to examine the current trends, intellectual structure, key themes, its evolution, dominant topics, and theoretical grounding of career sustainability research. Also, to develop an integrated conceptual framework and provide potential future research directions. Design/methodology/approach Bibliographic data on career sustainability research have been extracted from the Web of Science and Scopus databases published during 1992–2023. The analysis was performed using Bibliometrix R-package to discover the most influential aspects of the field. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and content analysis were conducted to set future research directions. Findings The findings revealed consistent growth in research publications on the topic. The co-citation network depicted three knowledge clusters of foundation, antecedents and evolution of sustainable careers. Key themes include “contingent work,” “employability,” “competencies,” “gender,” etc., along with “social development of employees” as a prominent topic. In addition, conservation of resources and social cognitive career theory are central to the topic. Finally, an integrated conceptual framework and valuable recommendations are presented. Practical implications This review serves as a roadmap for researchers to plan their research in emerging dimensions. In addition, providing valuable insights for policymakers and organizations to design programs that foster sustainable career paths. Originality/value The study presents a comprehensive overview of the trends, and future research avenues for career sustainability research based on bibliometric analysis, machine learning topic modeling and an integrated conceptual framework is developed, which is a novel contribution to existing literature.