Abstract:

The Career Construction Model of Adaptation (CCMA) conceptualizes career adaptation as a dynamic process through which individuals respond to career tasks, role transitions, and contextual uncertainty. It specifies four sequential stages: adaptive readiness, adaptability resources, adapting responses, and adaptation results. Although CCMA has been widely used in empirical studies, existing evidence has rarely been reviewed from the perspective of its complete process mechanism. This review synthesized 101 empirical studies published since 2012 to examine empirical tests of CCMA, clarify variable positioning within its four-stage structure, and identify directions for further model development.
This review contributes to CCMA research in four respects. First, it shifts the review focus from career adaptability as an isolated construct to CCMA as a four-stage process model. Previous reviews and meta-analyses have mainly summarized the antecedents, correlates, and outcomes of career adaptability. In contrast, this review treats career adaptation as a process in which different stages serve distinct theoretical functions. Based on database searches and backward citation tracking, we included empirical studies that explicitly used CCMA or tested stage pathways implied by the model. Each study was coded for variables, model paths, research design, sample characteristics, and career developmental stage.
Second, the review clarifies variable positioning within the four stages. Existing empirical studies differ considerably in assigning variables to CCMA stages. One inconsistency concerns the treatment of external contextual factors, such as parental support, educational environment, and parent-child relationship quality. These variables have sometimes been treated as adaptive readiness, although they more directly reflect contextual conditions than internal preparedness to adapt. Another inconsistency concerns the distinction between adapting responses and adaptation results. Variables such as academic or work engagement have sometimes been treated as adaptive behaviors and sometimes as outcomes, blurring the boundary between adaptive action and adaptation states. To improve comparability, this review classifies variables according to their theoretical functions: readiness as internal preparedness, resources as career adaptability, responses as adaptive beliefs, behaviors, or barriers, and results as relatively final states of person-environment fit or career functioning.
Third, this review evaluates empirical support for CCMA by linking process pathways with career developmental stages. Full four-stage tests are mainly concentrated in the exploration stage and the early establishment stage. In early exploration, studies usually involve students in educational contexts and use CCMA to explain general adaptation outcomes, such as well-being, life satisfaction, school satisfaction, and meaning in life. In late exploration, studies are more closely related to the school-to-work transition and focus more on career-specific outcomes, such as career decidedness, career certainty, employability, career commitment, and pre-entry adaptation. In early establishment, CCMA has been used to explain work-role adaptation through job-related responses and outcomes such as job embeddedness, job crafting, work engagement, performance, perceived career success, and career sustainability. However, evidence from the growth, maintenance, and disengagement stages remains limited. Existing studies also rarely specify whether variables correspond to the core developmental tasks of each stage. Future CCMA research should therefore select variables and construct pathways according to the specific tasks of different career stages.
Partial pathway studies serve a different purpose. Rather than testing the complete four-stage sequence, they use selected stages of CCMA to examine specific relationships among variables. For example, readiness-resources-responses studies examine whether psychological traits and beliefs foster career adaptability, which then predicts planning, exploration, self-efficacy, and career construction behaviors. Resources-responses-results and resources-results studies explain how career adaptability is linked to career or life outcomes, either through adaptive responses such as work engagement and job crafting or through more direct associations. These studies enrich understanding of specific mechanisms within CCMA, but they should be interpreted as evidence for partial mechanisms rather than direct tests of the full dynamic process.
Fourth, this review identifies feedback mechanisms and cyclical pathways as a key direction for future research. Most existing studies adopt a sequential logic in which readiness predicts resources, resources predict responses, and responses predict results. However, career construction theory also implies repeated adjustment between individuals and environments. Adaptation results may reshape later readiness and resources, whereas adapting responses may strengthen or deplete adaptability resources. Future studies should examine these reciprocal processes through multiwave longitudinal designs, transition-based tracking, intervention follow-ups, and qualitative longitudinal methods.
Overall, this review shows that CCMA has received broad empirical attention, but its development as a dynamic process model remains incomplete. Future research should justify the stage assignment of variables, select variables according to the core tasks of specific career developmental stages, and examine feedback mechanisms within and across adaptation cycles. CCMA should be understood not only as a sequential model of career adaptation, but also as a framework for explaining the continuous construction and reconstruction of careers over time.

Key words: career construction model of adaptation, career adaptability, career adaptation, career development stages