Organizational and individual control of career development in engineering project work

In this paper I compare the situations of engineers, managers, and clerical workers in engineering consulting projects in the Norwegian oftshore oil business in order to determine what factors facilitate career development and who controls career development. I argue that career development depends on a series of elements including the availability of jobs, access to information about jobs, the arrangement of jobs into a clear sequence, tasks or training to enhance ability, the collection of information about a worker's ability and progress, and the dissemination of this information about the worker. Whether these elements are present depends to a large extent on how interested the employing organization is in the careers of a group of workers and on whether the workers themselves are able to look out for their own interests.