Is career plateau a relevant concept in the Irish Financial Sector post Celtic Tiger years?

Career development is mainly concerned with how a career evolves towards some degree of success, which is dependent on prestige promotional job titles and a balancing act of the career triangle - work, associations with colleagues and personal development. When the career triangle is out of balance due to provisional organisational constraints, the reverse – career plateau - can be distressing and may lead to a number of negative work attitudes. The purpose of this study is to examine the affects of four career plateau typologies (structural, job content, double and professional plateau) on three work attitudes namely job satisfaction, career satisfaction and turnover intentions. This study will also explore the coping strategies employees in the Irish Financial Sector select to cope with lack of challenges and promotions in their job. Structural plateau is controlled by restrictions put in place due to pyramidal organisational structures which give rise to the lack of promotional opportunities leading to poor performance, increase in job dissatisfaction and reduce moral. Job content plateau generates an overall stagnation on the job due to lack of challenges and boredom whereas professional plateau is caused by job content plateau and lacking professional development. Double plateau is when an individual experience both structural and job content plateau simultaneously. Full time permanent employees, who are over the age of 30, with more than three years’ service within the same organisation, were asked to participate in this study. Data was collected from 56 recipients working in three multinational investment banks based in the Irish Financial Service Centre. This research adopted a quantitative, deductive approach, comprising of an anonymous online selfadministered questionnaire with a 59 percent response rate. The findings show that turnover intentions had positive correlations with structural plateau and double plateau, whilst having a negative correlation with professional plateau. Job satisfaction and career satisfaction only had a positive correlation with professional plateau and did not relate to any of the other three typologies of career plateau. The most frequently reported career plateau coping strategies were job involvement (44.6%), job withdrawal (16.1%), non-work activities (12.6%), while mental coping (7.1%) and discuss problem (1.8%) were the least frequently reported