Beatrice van der Heijden - Biography#

Beatrice I.J.M. Van der Heijden is a full professor of Strategic HRM at the Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and Head of the Department Strategic HRM. Moreover, she is affiliated as Professor of Strategic HRM at the Open University of the Netherlands, at Ghent University, Belgium, at the University of the Free State Business School, Bloemfontein, South-Africa, and at Kingston University, London, UK. In addition, she has been (re)invited as visiting professor for many universities across the world, where she has spent several weeks/months, working on co-publications with colleagues in her field, and guiding PhD students and other junior scholars in their endeavors towards publishing in peer-reviewed journals. Beatrice holds a MA in Work and Organizational Psychology from the Radboud University, and a PhD in Management Science from the University of Twente.

She coordinated, among others, two European cross-cultural research projects on career success and premature retirement. Van der Heijden is Editor-in-Chief for the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, and has guest edited and published in top-tier journals, such as Journal of Vocational Behavior, HRM, Human Relations, Human Resource Development Quarterly, Human Resource Management Journal, Work & Stress, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, and Academy of Management Annals.

Her work builds explicitly upon problems and questions arising from working life practice, and she invests considerable efforts to close gaps between academic and professional fields. She has developed and validated operationalisations and measurements of career-related concepts, taking into account the complexity and dynamics of nowadays' working life. Her research has resulted into evidence-based recommendations for sustainable career development aimed at supporting life-long learning and employability. She adopts an integral approach highlighting and incorporating individual, job-related, organizational and societal determinants for success at the workplace throughout the life-span. In line with her interest in so-called Positive Psychology, research aimed at designing healthy, prosperous, meaningful, challenging and sustainable careers has formed the basis of her work.

Her intellectual contributions in the form of psychometrically sound measurements for, among others, occupational expertise and employability, and their determinants and outcomes, are of considerable importance for the field, and are widely recognized and used in research across the globe.