A Phenomenological Investigation of the Successful Employees’ Lived Experience of Their Career Path

This study is aimed at investigating the lived experience of successful employees of their career path. Lived experience is indeed the direct and unmediated understanding of experiences in our virtual and daily lives achieved without resorting to ordinary thinking and conceptualization. The statistical population of the study consists of all successful working men and women in Boroojerd in 2018. The required data were collected through purposive sampling method. In the first stage of sampling, conducted for identifying successful working people, 200 people were selected to participate in the study by filling the Hirsch et al. (2017) job success questionnaire. In the second stage, the participants' were scores using SPSS-22 software, and those who scored above 120 on the job success questionnaire were identified as successful people, 12 of whom were interviewed in depth. In the first stage, the research tool included a job success questionnaire, and in the second stage, an in-depth unstructured interview was fulfilled. The data were analyzed by theoretical coding. Having coded the data in three stages of open, axial, selective coding, the researchers identified a total of 49 open codes, 13 axial codes and finally 3 selected codes. The results indicated that successful people are involved in different life experiences in their career path which affect their success.