The Things That Drive Us – How the Next Generation of IT Professionals Defines Contemporary Career Success

Modern career concepts revolutionize our understanding of a successful career. Employees nowadays define career success in many diverse ways, based on a variety of personal goals. To attract the next generation of IT professionals and to improve gender balance in IT, organizations must understand future IT professionals’ perceptions of a successful career. By analyzing 127 personal career success definitions from IT students in Germany, we present a broad spectrum of desired career success factors in IT. We illustrate the concept of career success dualism, which describes career success as a balance between multiple factors, such as remuneration and work-life balance. Furthermore, we present how female IT students have a stronger drive toward subjective career success factors than males. Our study contributes to a better understanding of current IT students and suggests how organizations can hire and retain the next generation of IT professionals.