Career Constellations: A Strategic Guide to Navigate Your Career

By Risto M Koskinen

Career Constellations offers a fresh way to understand and navigate professional life. Moving beyond outdated metaphors of ladders and tracks, this book introduces constellation-based models that help readers visualize, interpret, and shape their evolving identities and opportunities.

Through practical tools such as Constellation Maps, Disclosing Triangles, and Adjacent Triangle Strategies, and grounded in decades of coaching and research, this guide empowers you to:

- Surface and interpret patterns of identity, tension, and aspiration
- Map roles and relationships as dynamic systems, not static lists
- Pivot, reposition, and experiment strategically in uncertain environments
- Move from self-observation to purposeful, adaptive design

Drawing on real-world cases and deep professional insight, Career Constellations speaks to mid-career professionals, coaches, and organizational leaders alike: anyone ready to step beyond reactive choices and begin crafting careers as living, evolving systems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand
• Release date: Jun 4, 2025
• ISBN: 9789528912460

Risto M Koskinen

Risto M. Koskinen, MBA, Certified Progress Coach®, and certified supervisor, has decades of experience as a coach, educator, and framework designer. Known as #CoachRisto on LinkedIn and widely recognized as a TopVoice, he regularly shares thoughtful and practical insights on career navigation, mid-career shifts, and evolving professional identities. His approach blends scholarly foundations in education, sociology, and business with hands-on coaching and personal development expertise. At the heart of his work is a commitment to fostering self-awareness, surfacing transferable skills, and enabling confident, purpose-driven transitions. He is the author of Mastering Mid-Career Transition: Discovering a New Purposeful Career (2024), Career Transition Coaching: A Toolbook for Coaches (2024), and Beyond Mid-Career: Reframing Success, Generating Legacy (2025), each addressing key stages and dimensions of professional evolution.

Book preview

PART I

FROM PATH TO PATTERN

Rethinking Career Navigation

Careers have evolved. This section offers an intellectual and strategic foundation for navigating their increasing complexity. It moves beyond structural shifts to consider mental reframing, and introduces constellation-based career design as a method for engaging with this dynamic landscape.

OPENING PERSPECTIVE

THE LANDSCAPE HAS CHANGED

From upward career logic to adaptive moves

For much of the 20th century, a good career meant choosing a profession, staying the course, and moving steadily upward. The metaphor was compelling and straightforward: a ladder. One step after another, rung by rung, until you reach the top.

That logic no longer fits the world we live in. Today, the work landscape is more fluid, complex, and far less predictable. The ladder has lost its relevance, not because people are less ambitious, but because work structures have changed. Traditional boundaries between work and life, industry and role, stability and growth have blurred or broken.

What professionals are experiencing now is not just disruption. It’s transformation. Job titles no longer capture who we are. A single role rarely holds all our potential. And career progress is just as likely from a sideways move or a personal project as from a promotion. In place of a single right path, we now see multiple paths, adaptive moves, and emerging identities.

Professionals today are not climbing; they’re navigating. They navigate across roles and industries, between values and goals, through uncertainty and opportunity. They adapt to shifting contexts, learn through experimentation, and design their careers by pattern, not plan.

And yet, even as the structures change, many of the old career narratives remain. People still carry the expectation that success should be linear. That changing direction means starting over. That security comes from staying put. These outdated logics quietly shape how professionals think, decide, and doubt.

That is where this book begins – not merely as a guide, but as a reframing. A career may be viewed as a constellation: a dynamic and evolving system where elements shift, align, and interact. Through this perspective, tools are introduced to support mapping possibilities, decoding tensions, and cultivating strategic clarity amidst uncertainty.

This book is for those who no longer see a clear ladder – and are ready to chart a new kind of map.

CHAPTER 1

OUTDATED NARRATIVES

Letting go of internalized career myths

As the mental and structural landscapes have changed fundamentally –

From defining roles to evolving identities

From climbing upward to navigating complexity

From following trajectories to expanding possibilities

From hierarchical paths to interconnected networks

– many people still carry stories that no longer match their lived expe-rience.

These narratives were not handed down as formal rules. They were absorbed quietly – through company cultures, education systems, family expectations, and the ambient noise of early career advice. Even as professionals adapt their work lives, these inherited scripts often linger, shaping how people interpret change, success, or uncertainty.

One of the most enduring assumptions is that a good career moves in a clear, upward direction – that progress should look like linear advancement. It often appears as though deviation from upward movement signals failure. Yet, in contemporary contexts, careers seldom unfold along predictable, linear trajectories. Sideways moves, pauses, portfolio shifts, or pivots often create more depth, alignment, and opportunity than a strictly vertical path ever could.

Another internalized belief is that changing direction means starting over – as if prior experience is wasted. But careers are rarely reset. Skills are portable. Relationships carry over. Perspective expands. What looks like a detour from the outside is often a strategic reconfiguration on the inside.

Many professionals also feel pressure to have a detailed plan – a polished five-year arc that reassures them and others. However, long-term planning has become unreliable. In a fast-changing world, adaptability is more valuable than certainty. Testing, reflecting, and realigning are core skills, not signs of indecision.

There’s also a subtle belief that staying in one place equals safety. But in reality, remaining static can become a risk – especially in evolving industries or outdated roles. Stability today comes not from staying put but from staying ready.

Perhaps most paralyzing is the idea that there’s one right next move – and that the goal is to find it. This creates pressure and indecision, especially when multiple paths seem possible. However, career transitions rarely depend on identifying a singular perfect choice. Instead, they emerge through context-aware movement and iterative experimentation.

Letting go of this inherited logic doesn’t mean abandoning structure or purpose. It means replacing brittle myths with models that reflect how careers work now – with all their complexity, variation, and agency. The next chapter examines several models that move beyond the traditional career ladder, offering frameworks grounded in dynamic and evolving patterns of work and meaning.

COACHING CORNER

Working With What We’ve Inherited

The reframing offered in this chapter draws heavily on concepts from identity theory, systems thinking, and developmental coaching. Notably, Herminia Ibarra’s work on Working Identity (2003) challenges the notion of career linearity by framing identity as iterative and emergent through action. Similarly, Tatiana Bachkirova (2011) introduces the multiplicity of selves in coaching, validating the internal conflicts professionals experience when moving beyond fixed narratives.

From a sociocultural standpoint, Yrjö Engeström’s developmental work research (e.g., Engeström, 1990) highlights how individual agency evolves within and against systemic structures – an idea deeply relevant to today’s career transitions. Rather than a rigid climb, careers are increasingly situated within activity systems where contradictions drive transformation.

For a career coach, understanding these theoretical perspectives provides more than intellectual scaffolding – it shapes how we listen, question, and design interventions.

Clients often come with inherited scripts: assumptions that success is linear, that a pivot is a setback, or that ambiguity signals failure. A coach risks unintentionally reinforcing these outdated beliefs without grounding in updated career models.

Grounding coaching sessions in adaptive logic allows practitioners to validate nonlinearity, emphasize the portability of skills, and support clients in experimenting with strategic self-authorship. Theory becomes not an abstraction but a compass for empathy and challenge – a way of helping people narrate complexity without oversimplification.

This framework opens up several strategic pathways for coaching dialogue and intervention.

First, we can reframe career detours as strategic reconfigurations of value. However, reframing is not just changing the words. Drawing inspiration from systemic family therapy, powerful reframes are not random rewordings but purposeful transformations of meaning. Effective reframing:

Introduces something new while retaining something familiar

Offers a positive connotation

Opens up new resources

Enhances self-esteem

Encourages the creation of new models and narratives

For example, what may initially appear as regression can, within this framework, be reconsidered as horizontal growth – deepening networks, expanding context awareness, or developing transferable skills. A coach grounded in systems thinking can help the client see these moves not as deviations but as deliberate redistributions of value and energy.

Second, we can replace goal obsession with iterative clarity. Instead of setting rigid endpoints, adaptive coaching emphasizes movement with feedback. In their paper, Goals Gone Wild, Ordoñez et al. (2009) warn against the overuse of goals, arguing that narrowly defined targets can crowd out creativity, distort risk perception, and reduce ethical sensitivity.

Career clarity often emerges through action, not advanced planning in dynamic contexts. Strategic iteration – trying, testing, adjusting – becomes a more accurate model for forward movement. This means prototyping decisions rather than finalizing them – a shift from committing to the answer to committing to the next move.

Third, rather than converging too quickly on a fixed identity, we can inhabit the plural – exploring multiple emergent selves that reflect the complexity of their environments, motivations, and values. This perspective combines Tatiana Bachkirova’s (2011) idea of the internal coaching dialogue between selves, Norm Amundson’s (2003) emphasis on active engagement and career flow, and R. Vance Peavy’s (1997) socio-dynamic guidance, which reframes careers as narrative, contextual, and co-created rather than linear and isolated.

Working with possible selves means exploring tension without rushing to resolve it. It’s in this dynamic holding that richer identities emerge.

CHAPTER 2

THREE MODERN CAREER MODELS

Boundaryless, Protean, and Kaleidoscopic Careers

Career researchers have developed various models to describe how individuals move between roles, industries, and opportunities within a rapidly evolving job market. This chapter examines three such models as alternative perspectives on career growth. Understanding these frameworks can illuminate movement patterns and inform strategic choices that align with evolving goals, skills, and circumstances.

1. Boundaryless Careers

Professionals no longer rely on one employer or one sector. Instead, they build portfolio careers, diversify their skills, and shift across ecosystems. Career growth comes from movement, not hierarchy.

The Boundaryless Career is a response to the decline of the company man (or woman, for that matter). Traditional careers were built around stability and loyalty – people spent decades within a single company, moving up the ranks. But today, this Faustian trade-off (i.e., devote yourself to the company, and the company will take care of you – even in the hardest of times) no longer exists. You can no longer count on a single employer for long-term security. Instead, career growth now depends on moving beyond company boundaries.

The Boundaryless Career Model, first introduced by Arthur and Rousseau (1996) and later expanded by researchers such as Wos (2024), emphasizes:

Seeking novel challenges that expand expertise

Building strong networks to create career opportunities

Developing new skills and competencies to remain adaptable

Conscious positioning to leverage industry trends and emerging fields

These strategies enable professionals to move between industries, organizations, and various work structures (e.g., employment, freelancing, consulting). Instead of relying on internal promotions, professionals with boundaryless careers intentionally build diverse career portfolios. Blending full-time roles, side businesses, and independent work allows them to discover and create unconventional opportunities, often in less competitive but high-growth fields. This flexibility enhances career security and future-proofs careers in an evolving job market.

Aron: Navigating from Military to Civilian Professionalism

Aron, a former military officer started his career in national defense, gaining expertise in risk assessment, crisis management, and leadership under pressure. After leaving active service, he transitioned into corporate security, leveraging his military background to manage security operations for a multinational firm. Over time, he built a network in the private security industry, taking on high-profile risk management projects across various sectors.

Recognizing a growing demand for geopolitical risk consulting, he pivoted again into independent security consulting, advising businesses on security risks and crisis response strategies. At no point did his career follow a single linear path. Instead, he leveraged experience across multiple sectors, building a career that evolved beyond traditional boundaries.

A boundaryless career isn’t about abandoning stability but recognizing how skills translate across industries and using strategic moves to create new opportunities.

2. Protean Careers

Coined by Hall (1976), this model centers on internal drivers: values, autonomy, and adaptability. Protean professionals aren’t climbing a company’s ladder – they’re crafting paths that reflect their evolving sense of self.

While boundaryless careers emphasize external movement – shifting across industries, roles, and work structures – protean professionals focus inward. They take ownership of their career direction, defining success on their terms and aligning choices with personal growth, skill mastery, and core values.

Traditional career paths often assume that companies define success through structured promotion tracks and external validation. The Protean Career Model flips this logic. Success is no longer determined by titles, salary increases, or hierarchical advancement, but by an individual’s ability to adapt, learn continuously, and remain aligned with what matters most to them.

Protean professionals do not wait for recognition or rely on employer-defined pathways. Instead, they make proactive moves based on personal priorities, emerging learning opportunities, and the flexibility needed to shape a career that remains relevant and meaningful across changing life stages.

Their success is shaped by several key principles:

1. Success is self-defined.

Instead of relying on employer-driven promotions, protean professionals set their own standards for achievement – whether that means learning a new skill, shifting industries, or balancing work with