This book defines career barriers, considers how people react to them, and offers ways to overcome and prevent them. It is geared towards people experiencing career barriers; for students at the start of their careers; for seasoned employees wanting to avoid or be prepared to deal with career barriers; and for managers, human resource professionals, and researchers who want to understand how people confront career barriers. Chapter 1 describes characteristics of career barriers and types of barriers. Chapter 2 focuses on emotions and thoughts, and their relationships as they affect how people respond to negative life events. Chapter 3 describes coping strategies. Chapter 4 explains three parts to career motivation: resilience, insight, and identity. Chapter 5 looks more closely at resilience and an associated concept, hardiness. Chapter 6 outlines situational conditions that support career resilience, insight, and identity; describes factors that constitute a continuous learning culture; and considers ways to support older workers facing career decline. Chapter 7 describes programmatic interventions for organizations to help employees cope with career barriers. Chapter 8 makes recommendations to help people prevent career barriers. Appendixes include the following: additional case examples; a catalog of cases; case description and rating forms; and relationships between appraisal, coping, and career motivation. (Contains 213 references and author and subject indexes). (YLB)