Development of Japanese Version of Proactive Career Behavior Scale for Middle-Aged and Older Workers

Abstract

In this era of 100-year life expectancy, it is desirable for middle-aged and older workers not to leave their life and career to their employer, but to proactively plan their life and career, and to systematically prepare for skill development and networking. As a scale to measure the behavior of such middle-aged and older workers, we translated the Proactive Career Behavior Items developed by Strauss et al.(2012) into Japanese with the permission of the original authors, and after confirming equivalence, we conducted a web-based questionnaire survey of 210 workers aged 50 to 60 who were employed by companies with more than 500 employees, with the aim of verifying reliability and validity. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted on the same 13 items in the four factors of “Career Planning,” “Proactive Skill Development,” “Career Consultation,” and “Network Building” as in the original version. The Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficient was .89 or higher for all sub-factors. As convergent validity was also confirmed, it was shown that the scale created can be used as the Japanese version of the Proactive Career Behavior Scale.