Career plays an important role in every individual’s life. It nourishes ones self-esteem and at the same time gives recognition. It is defined as a sequence of positions, roles or jobs held during one’s working life.

Career cannot be confined to one organisation. It can be said that career represents an organised path taken by an individual across time and space with a horizon.Career anchors play significant role as it acts as a foundation of basics, with deep roots of conviction, competence and mental preparedness for pursuing a path. Therefore, career anchors are the basic attitudinal characteristics that guide an individual throughout their careers. The needs and drives are two components which plays crucial role as career anchors.

We all firmly believe that every individual is different. The individuals with predominant characteristics of independence and autonomy who would not like to be bossed over and would desire to have freedom to operate and take decisions would excel as consultants, professionals, freelancers and entrepreneurs. Some individual’s desire for security and stability would prefer to work with same employer for life and also would remain with the same nature of work.

Moreover, individuals with technical and functional competence anchor would have strong inclination to develop something engineers, scientists, technologists come under this category. The individuals with such characteristics emphasise on specialization. There are individuals with management as a career anchor has good planning, organizing, managing and controlling skills. These individuals play role of facilitators and enjoy responsibility.  They view the broader aspects of the things and have excellent decision making skill.

Individuals with creativity as an anchor are successful as artists, free-lancers and innovators. They enjoy their jobs and as there is freedom to create and not bound by organisational framework. Service as a career anchor drives individuals to work with non-profit organisations and special schools and there are individuals who have pure challenge as career anchor,   they are attracted to challenges and solving them is their main motive.

It has been widely accepted that each employee might have the combination of two or more types of career anchors hence in such cases analyzing the employees needs is very important. Even organisations with career planners can help the employees which would bring fruitful results for both the organisation and as well as the individual.