Career Planning and Performance of Academic Professionals of Higher Education in Bangladesh

Abstract

Career planning has traditionally been defined as the process of evaluating personal strengths, values, and aspirations, setting up goals and objectives, determining the steps required to achieve them, and compiling this information into a written career plan that will be reviewed and updated on a regular schedule. Since the previous few decades, it has been one of the fastest-growing sectors of human resource management. The overall objective of the study was to examine the impact of career planning phenomena on the performance of academic professionals. This study aimed to explore the key dimensions of career planning for academic professionals. Besides, this study intended to assess the effect of career planning dimensions on the job satisfaction of academic professionals. Again, another purpose of the study was to examine the effect of career planning dimensions on the performance of academic professionals. In addition, this research wanted to measure the effect of job satisfaction on the performance of academic professionals. Moreover, this study was also designed to assess the mediation effect of job satisfaction between career planning dimensions and the performance of academic professionals. Furthermore, the present study also tried to examine the moderating role of motivation on the relationship between job satisfaction and the performance of academic professionals. The study employed a post-positivist research paradigm to address the issues underlying the career planning and performance of academic professionals in various job satisfaction and performance-related activities after carefully assessing the ontology, epistemology, methodology, and axiology of all four study paradigms. Therefore, this study used a mixed-methods approach as the outcome of one method complementing another method. Thus, this research employed a qual→QUAN-based approach as it belongs to the category of mixed-methods. The planned research was primarily qualitative, but the researcher would supplement its findings with quantitative data. For the qualitative study, the researcher conducted 21 in-depth interviews to collect the data for this study. The qualitative data was processed and analyzed with the help of NVivo 12 Pro software. Then, content analysis was performed for data analysis with the help of an interpretive phenomenological approach. After the completion of the qualitative study, a total of 459 respondents were used to analyze the quantitative data through the help of semi-structured questionnaires. The quantitative data was processed and analyzed by using the IBM SPSS 26 application program; the measurement model and structural relationship were analyzed with the help of SmartPLS version- 3.2.9. Thus, this study used a PLS-based SEM technique for quantitative data analysis. Besides, mediation and moderation effects were analyzed with the assistance of PROCESS macro in IBM SPSS 26. Therefore, the G*Power 3.1.9.2 software is utilized to conduct an analysis of the effectiveness of the research model.