Vocational behavior research: Past topics and future trends and challenges

As part of the 50th anniversary special issue, this article aims to give an overview of the topics of past vocational behavior research and to reflect upon important future topics and challenges. Vocational behavior research as a discipline diversified to a substantial degree over the past 50 years. Starting with career choice and a matching approach as main topics of the field, recent review work showed that several topic areas (e.g., career success and well-being, employability, proactivity and career self-management, and socio-occupational context) emerged and dominate the field in recent years. The present article provides a short summary of recent review work. Additionally, the article identifies and suggests some future trends and challenges of vocational behavior research (e.g., life span approaches, historical and time-specific context, and interdisciplinarity). By doing so, this article provides a summary of the past and looks into the future, hoping that the next 50 years of JVB research will be as fruitful and promising as the past 50 years have already been.