From Resisting to Sustaining: Exploring Skilled Migrants’ Alternative Career Pathways
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This qualitative study employs a grounded theory approach to explore the lived experiences of skilled migrants in Canada who engage in alternative careers. The study investigates identity work and meaning-making processes of career actors who perceive alternative career options as “beginning again.” Through 30 semi-structured in-depth interviews, the findings identify three distinct alternative career pathways: provisional, experimental, and reformist; each characterized by a unique form of identity work and accompanying types of meaning-making. Each path provides distinctive insights into how skilled migrants cope with, and adapt to, the mismatches between their skills and new job demands, challenging and redefining their professional identities. Additionally, it highlights how each career pathway may shape migrants’ subjective well-being. This study advances the existing literature on major career transitions, specifically skilled migrant career trajectories inside local organizations, by highlighting how they reconstruct new professional identities and derive meaning in contexts that often fall below their qualifications and career aspirations. This study extends existing research on employability and career sustainability by integrating the dynamic processes of identity negotiation and meaning-making in the face of career transitions. It also builds on the existing meaning-making literature by highlighting the career narratives of those who must search for new meanings while pursuing “less than ideal” career opportunities. Finally, the findings provide practical implications related to outcomes of alternative career opportunities on migrant career success and, more broadly, for employers and policymakers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".