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Top1. Introduction
Since 2000, information technology (IT), Internet, information systems (IS), social networks service (SNS), and artificial intelligence (AI) have being developed rapidly, and are indeed significant issues to support enterprises to offer their products and services to their global customers. Information systems (IS) play a critical role because it is the core capability in organization (Abubakre et al., 2017; Chang et al., 2011), and its IT/IS personnel have to maintain this core capability for the organization. From SARS crisis in 2003, till COVID-19 epidemic outbreak in the spring of 2020, these technologies have been adopted to help employees and push IT development. The IT and the Internet have become essential tools instead of some physical transactions and works (e.g., e-commerce, e-learning, telemedicine, online shopping) (Chang & Fang, 2020; Hardy, 2020; Kim, 2020; Pimentel, 2020). Therefore, the role of the IT/IS personnel will be much more critical in the future. Thus, it is necessary for the organizations to retain qualified IT/IS personnel to improve their organizational competence (e.g., Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Limited, (TSMC); and InfoChamp Systems Corp.).
Due to the limited opportunities to learn state-of-the-art IT knowledge, the IT/IS personnel have a high propensity for voluntary turnover to improve their career ability (Babin et al., 2020; Chang et al., 2012). Meanwhile, the turnover of IT/IS personnel is costly, not only in terms of replacing the staff and training new employees, but also in terms of systems development productivity and quality (Jiang & Klein, 1999-2000; Thatcher et al., 2002-3). Both professionals and academics have serious concerns about how to retain qualified IT/IS personnel (Adams et al., 2006; Joseph et al., 2007). It will be a useful approach for the organization to focus on making the career plan for IT/IS personnel to reduce their turnover rate (Srivastava & Eachempati, 2021; Sumner & Yager, 2004).
The concept of career anchor was originally proposed by Schein (1978) as the guidance for career decisions. Career anchors are a set of career-related aspirations that an individual does not easily surrender even when facing a difficult, major decision (Schein, 1978). Till now, IT researchers (Chang, 2010; Crepeau et al., 1992; DeLong, 1982; Igbaria & Baroudi, 1993; Schein, 1978) have identified a number of anchors among IT/IS personnel; such as technical competence1, managerial competence2, geographic security3, challenge4, identity5, service6, lifestyle7, and entrepreneurship8. This paper presents the career anchor development processes from the career anchor perspectives. Because the new emerging nature of career paths is multidirectional, dynamic, and fluid, some career anchors have similar meanings.