Today’s world of work increasingly demands active self-determination in career development, with profound consequences for career success, work and life quality and work performance. However, existing research proposed rather static models of important career orientations and behaviors and falls short of investigated developmental processes and relations to important personal and organizational career outcomes. Expanding this line of work, the present study examines the dynamic process of self-directed career management in the transition from university to work. The goals of the study are to improve our understanding of how university graduates manage work and career as central components of their lives in a self-directed manner; how this process affects and interacts with career success, career satisfaction, work and life quality, organizational engagement, and work performance and how psychological and sociodemographic factors affect those processes. The results will enhance the scientific understanding of the antecedents, processes, and consequences of self-directed career management and have implications for career development in university and organizational settings.