Sustainable careers require happiness, health, and productivity to be considered jointly, yet little is known about how these indicators combine within workers. Using fuzzy clustering, we examined sustainable-career profiles among 1,330 Colombian workers and compared them on perceived external employability and wage. Seven of eight theoretically plausible profiles emerged: sustainable, happy–productive, happy–healthy, productive, happy, healthy, and non-sustainable. The sustainable profile showed the most consistently favorable outcomes, reporting higher employability than all profiles except the happy–productive profile and higher wages than the single-indicator and non-sustainable profiles, but not the partially sustainable profiles. The partially sustainable profiles did not consistently outperform single-indicator profiles. These findings support a configurational understanding of career sustainability while showing that favorable indicators do not operate as a simple additive hierarchy. Career sustainability depends on the pattern in which happiness, health, and productivity coexist within workers and contexts.
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Bayona et al. (2026) studied this question.
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