Current career literature discusses the occurrence of new forms of career including increasing mobility, boundary crossing and self-directedness and the decline of the traditional, organizational career. One major shortcoming of contemporary career literature is the rather vague and one-sided conceptualization of "new career" concepts, which stress the increasing importance of the individual career actor as compared to the employing organization, but leave out other relevant reference groups such as occupational communities and family. Moreover, recent empirical results suggests that new forms of career are not as widespread as postulated and, importantly, that employees following such new career paths are less satisfied with their career than employees following a traditional career. The focus on self versus organization in current academic career thinking might not represent people's career reality, thereby impeding theoretical and practical progress in career research and career management practices. This project therefore will systematically investigate the importance of reference groups for the conceptualization of career orientations and career success as well as for social capital needed for career transitions along the desired career path. The central concepts of career orientation and career success will be analyzed taking into account their broader social context in terms of criteria covering subjective versus objective perspectives and self- versus other-referents. Career transitions will be defined with respect to the types of boundaries affected by moving to the desired new position and the individuals' social capital measured based on the number and diversity of contacts in the reference groups determined by these boundaries (i.e., organization, occupation, industry, job function). Hypotheses to be studied concern the relationships between career orientation, social capital, career transitions, and career success. The hypotheses will be tested with current participants and alumni of two continuing education programs in management using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The two programs aim at people who are currently employed and aspire to a job change, either in terms of upward movement within their current organization or in terms of changing employers and possibly also occupations. From the results we expect to learn more about the processes involved in successfully engaging in substantial career transitions across organizations and occupations and to better understand people's assessments of their own careers by explicitly including social reference groups beyond organization and self, such as occupational communities or family. We see our contributions in three domains within career research, a) concepts of careers, foremost the debate on traditional versus new careers, b) career self-management, specifically regarding requirements involved in career transitions beyond organizational and occupational boundaries, and c) definition of career success in light of self- and other-referent criteria. Beside the scientific results, we also foresee a significant practical impact of our study. As part of the project, instruments for monitoring career transitions of program alumni and for individual career coaching will be developed. These instruments should directly benefit the participants of the two educational programs as well as the programs themselves by increasing their attractiveness to future participants. Given the growing need for career mobility, even though it may grow more slowly than predicted by many, the study also has a broader impact through identifying specific challenges involved in career mobility and useful measures for meeting those challenges.