Career Re-Invention Through Entrepreneurial Mindset and Entrepreneurial Orientation in the Post-Pandemic Era: Multiple Cases from the Developed and Developing Countries

Introduction

From late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has continued to destroy jobs, and equally rendered several skills obsolete– a situation that calls for a pragmatic adaptation of skills and competencies to help employees and employers come to grips with the new realities (Osland et al., 2020). In most countries across the globe, proactive companies are already rethinking and reinventing their business models because of the uncertainty caused by the pandemic (Kilic, & Marin, 2020). According to the International Labour Organisation (2021a), the level of labour market disruption inflicted by the pandemic is unprecedented, as it brought working hours in the fourth quarter of 2020 down by 8.8 per cent, which corresponds to 255 million full-time jobs. Before the pandemic, the events that often trigger a career reinvention in the workplaces include corporate downsizing, increased globalization, deregulation, outsourcing, technological change, mergers, and acquisitions (Gysbers, Heppner, & Johnston, 1998; Heppner, 1998). The new norms of social distancing and travel restrictions adopted to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic have disrupted businesses, heightened massive job losses in some sectors, and lead to a reduction of the workforce in several others (Raimi, 2021). Most of the companies laying off and downsizing operations belong to the hospitality, tourism, and leisure sectors, while the companies actively employing and expanding business operations are those in the logistics, health, medicine, retailing sectors (Lane, 2021).

In the development literature, the two views for explicating the reactions to economic recession or environmental crises are vulnerability and resilience perspectives (Kitching et al., 2009; Smallbone et al., 2012). Both perspectives are used in the field of emergency management, social psychology, and development economics among others (Martini & Vespasiano, 2015; Papathoma-Köhle, Thaler & Fuchs, 2021). The vulnerability perspective of recession posits that individuals and corporate organisations are negatively affected by exposure to external shocks because they have limited resources, limited product lines, and limited customers, which tend to restrict their ability and capacity to survive the poverty pressures and harsh economic conditions imposed on their lifestyles and livelihoods (Kitching et al., 2009; Athwal et al., 2011). In reality, employees and businesses are vulnerable to social risks, physical threats, and economic shocks imposed by the pandemic ‘because they lack coping capacities’ (USP, 2013). The vulnerability view, which explains the helplessness and hopelessness of the individuals and businesses in the crisis period has been challenged by the proponents of the resilience viewpoint. The resilience perspective, however, explicates that individuals and corporate organisations within the economy have the ability and capability to survive exogenous shocks resulting from crises that hit the national economy, if they can adopt proactive and innovative strategies that would make them resilient (Wedawatta & Ingirige, 2012; Kitching, et al., 2009). The salient question: How true is the assertion that the individuals and corporate organisations within the economy have the ability and capability to survive exogenous shocks resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic?