The development of information society has been changing the architecture of product, organization, and industry. New industrial architecture has modular and network structure. As the progress of these changes, especially in information technology industry in United Stats, the diversity of individual career has been appeared. Someone became an entrepreneur, someone frequently moves to another company or industry, someone works for a company and a research laboratory at same time. These phenomena are expressed to the concept of "Boundaryless Career". At Silicon Valley, various new technologies or modules are produced by many venture companies and laboratories or universities. And they are integrated to a whole system by some big companies as system architects.
This paper has two research questions.
1) Has the diversity of career been progressing in Japanese information technology industry? In another words, is there the diversity of individual career orientations?
2) Which type of job or role does it match for each type of career orientations? Supposedly, the difference of career orientations leads to the difference of individual's behavior and learning style. Therefore, it is supposed that career orientations are concerned with performances of their jobs.
Based on the survey on software engineers working for Japanese companies, this paper analyzes about above two questions.
As the result of analysis, five types of career orientations were found. They can be called as Manager orientation, Project orientation, Advance/Universality orientation, Self reliance orientation, Expert orientation. The character of the mare summarized as follows.
1) Manager orientation
Those who have this orientation commit to the company and hope to promote and participate in management.
2) Project orientation
Those who have this orientation hope to participate and enjoy challenging and various projects.
3) Advance/Universality orientation
Those who have this orientation hope to research and find new theories, and to be praised by professionals outside the company.
4) Self reliance orientation
Those who have this orientation hope to be entrepreneurs or work like free agents.
5) Expert orientation
Those who have this orientation hope to develop their specialties and continue technical job.
Above five career orientations lead to different behaviors and learning styles.
Advance/Universality orientation and Self reliance orientation lead to learning advanced technologies and have a try at innovative Research and Development. Therefore, it is supposed that those who have these orientations can produce good results to develop advanced modules or new technologies.
Advance/Universality orientation leads to communicate with professionals outside the organization too. Hence, those who have it must be able to be good at technology-marketing, and constructing and using a technical information network. At the same time the analysis revealed that this sort of communication is very effective in software development which is typed as operating systems.
Expert orientation has something in common with Advance/Universality orientation, or Self reliance orientation. But it does not lead to have a try at innovative activities. It is suggested that those who have this orientation are steady engineers, they work under someone who has another orientation.
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