The career script serves as a kind of guide that individuals draw upon to make sense of their professional situation and to build their career paths. This guide consists of three components: interpretive frameworks that give shared meaning to individual career actions, resources that both enable and constrain those actions, and norms that legitimize or sanction them.

The career script is a conceptual framework for understanding the dual nature of careers. Career scripts are shaped by social structure and transformed by the individuals who engage with them, through a process of mutual and simultaneous influence.