Testing a career sustainability questionnaire with Polish workers

What is it about?

A "sustainable career" is one that keeps a person healthy, happy, productive, and able to contribute to society over the long run — not just employed. Italian researchers built a short questionnaire, the Sustainable Career Scale, to measure how sustainable people feel their own careers are, but a tool developed in one country does not always work in another. We translated and tested this scale with Polish workers across a pilot study and two larger studies, checking whether it was reliable, whether it measured the same thing for men and women and across age groups, and whether it related to things like work engagement, job satisfaction, burnout, and well-being. We found that the Polish version works well and captures four distinct aspects of a sustainable career (happiness, health, productivity, and social empowerment), although the "health" part was measured less precisely and needs improvement. Our results suggest the idea of a sustainable career travels beyond the country where the scale was first created, giving Polish researchers and career counsellors a validated tool to use.

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Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash

Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Career research now sees a "good" career as one that sustains a person's health, happiness, productivity, and social contribution over time — not just a stable, well-paid one. But the tools for measuring this were built and tested almost entirely in Western Europe, so it was unclear whether the concept travels. Ours is the first study to adapt and rigorously validate the Sustainable Career Scale outside its country of origin. We confirm its four dimensions hold up in a new culture, but show that they work best treated as distinct facets rather than one overarching factor. As automation and gig work reshape careers worldwide, this gives researchers a validated Polish tool and enables real cross-cultural comparison.

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