Abstract
Public administration has gradually moved from its bureaucratic approaches to incorporating and benefiting from interdisciplinary perspectives, drawing significantly from human resource management practices. An ocean of literature is available on the career resources that contribute to an individual's career success in the private sector. Factors contributing to career success are of primary interest to professionals, researchers, scholars and career counsellors. The career of a public administrator comes with multiple additional challenges unique to their job demands, and they need to understand which factors facilitate and hinder their career success. Some of these challenges that set their career apart from those working in the private sector stem from the fact that they have multiple accountabilities, are more prone to political pressures & bureaucracy, have expectations of being both result-oriented and customer-oriented, and expectation of a standardised implementation of policy across all contexts.
Our paper extends the literature on these career resources, specifically in the context of public administrators. We take account of the extant literature, and using the predictors of career success given by Ng & Feldman, 2014, we explore the role of various career resources for public administrators. One hundred and fifty-nine articles that discuss career resources available to public administrators were analysed using a structured literature review and bibliometric analysis. There are two distinct ways in which this systematic review aims to advance career research. We begin by outlining the current state of the literature on career resources available for public administrators and how this research is dispersed across various geographies, and highlight the seminal work on career resources in this field. Further, we discuss the fundamental theories that have been embraced, the research approaches that have been adopted and the categories of career resources available to the public administrators that have been focused on in the field. Second, considering that a scarce amount of research has been done on careers in this sector, we explored future research areas in the field of career resources that could expand our understanding and facilitate the career of a public administrator.