o:37915 Age and Career Resilience Through the Lens of Life Course Theory: Examining Individual Mechanisms and Macro-Level Context Across 28 Countries en ABSTRACT Career resilience is critical to the world's aging workforce, aiding older workers in adapting to the ever‐evolving nature of work. While ageist stereotypes often depict older workers as less resilient when faced with workplace changes, existing research studies offer conflicting evidence on whether older age hinders or improves career resilience. In response to this conflicting evidence, the present study employs multi‐level data from 6772 employees in 28 countries to examine the age‐career resilience relationships and underlying mechanisms, hence advancing our understanding of career resilience across the life course. By integrating macro‐contextual factors such as the unemployment rate and the culture of education with individual‐level mechanisms such as positive career meaning and career optimism, we provide a comprehensive model explaining how career resilience varies across age groups. Grounded in life course theory, our findings resolve prior inconsistencies in resilience research, contribute to bridging the micro‐macro gap in HRM literature, and challenge existing age‐based stereotypes. Funding: The article is the result of a collaborative effort by members of the 5C research group (https://5c.careers). Additionally, it is based upon work from COST Action Leverage, CA22120, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). The first author's work and data collection in Lithuania were partially funded by a grant from the Research Council of Lithuania (No. S‐MIP‐20‐9). age | career optimism | career resilience | country‐level context | life course theory | positive career meaning 1552099 10.1111/1748-8583.12596 1552101 0954-5395 2026-02-19T13:15:23.311Z 44 no 46 Biljana Bogićević Milikić Univerzitet u Beogradu Ekonomski fakultet 0000-0003-3084-8021 Bernadeta Goštautaitė (et al.) person application/pdf 900352 https://phaidrabg.bg.ac.rs/o:37915 no yes 18 70 92000001 11A03 Human Resource Management Journal 35 4 879 893 2025