From Career Fit to Ecosystem Regulation: Practitioner Constructions of Career Health in Singapore

Career health has emerged within Singapore’s workforce policy as a way of encouraging individuals to develop meaningful and resilient careers, yet little is known about how career practitioners understand and apply this idea in practice. Using constructivist grounded theory, this study examined how eight experienced career development practitioners in Singapore made sense of career health through their work with clients. Analysis generated five interrelated categories: multidimensional career functioning, reflective agency, meaning and values alignment, proactive resilience, and relational and structural embeddedness. Practitioners understood career health as extending beyond employment status or skills relevance to encompass changing interactions among personal, material, relational, and contextual conditions. The findings provide an empirically grounded practitioner perspective on career health and suggest that career development practice may support clients not only through occupational choice and skills development, but also through reflection, preparedness, meaning-making, and navigation of structural constraints.