Careers That Last — Sustainable Careers at Vlaamse TechWorks

A four-round, advanced sustainable-careers and workforce-strategy simulation set inside Vlaamse TechWorks NV, an Antwerp-headquartered industrial-software and automation company (2,600 staff across Belgium, the Netherlands and a Poland delivery centre; EUR 410M revenue, 11% margin). The firm has won 'best employer' awards for pay and perks, yet voluntary turnover has climbed to 17% firm-wide and 24% among the client-holding mid-career cohort, engagement has slipped, and a confidential review finds 78% of the ring-fenced EUR 4.2M development-and-wellbeing budget flows to early-career staff — leaving mid-career employees plateaued (last meaningful development 4+ years ago, squeezed by caregiving) and senior specialists with obsolescing skills, low external employability, and rising sickness absence. The board gives the new People Lead one budget cycle to measurably improve retention, employability and wellbeing across the whole life-course, or the EUR 4.2M reverts to reactive hiring (replacement cost ~EUR 55,000 per departure, ~EUR 8.3M/year leaking out) and the works council escalates to a formal grievance. Playing the HR / People Lead, the learner designs profile-specific interventions for three worker profiles — early-career, mid-career and senior specialists — through the sustainable-careers lens of De Vos, Van der Heijden & Akkermans: a career is sustainable to the degree it preserves health (wellbeing), happiness (person-career fit and meaning) and productivity (employability and contribution), co-produced at the interface of the employee, the organisation and the labour market. The Career Sustainability Index (CSI) encodes that health-happiness-productivity triad. Round 1: diagnose each profile's breakage and locate it at the employee, organisation and/or labour-market level, quantify the turnover cost, and set the CSI baseline. Round 2: design interventions per profile — development and reskilling, job redesign and workload guardrails, internal mobility and career pathing, flexible life-stage arrangements, mentoring and knowledge-transfer roles, and external-employability support — each matched to the right interface level, resolving where employability and wellbeing reinforce versus trade off. Round 3: allocate the full EUR 4.2M under a hard ceiling, including the politically hard rebalancing away from early-career's 78% share without triggering high-potential flight. Round 4: respond to mixed mid-cycle results and a complication (works-council pressure, a competitor poaching the upskilled mid-career cohort, or a 10% budget trim), institutionalise a standing sustainable-career system, and pitch the four-KPI scorecard to the board. The math rewards interface-level matching, a life-course allocation, deliberate employability-plus-meaning investment, and rebalancing-as-redesign — and punishes the five classic errors: high-potential tunnel vision, training as a universal remedy, hoarding employability for fear of attrition, perks over paths, and zero-sum rebalancing. Final KPIs track the Career Sustainability Index, retention, employability and wellbeing.