Abstract In the contemporary professional environment, there are many unforeseen changes because of wider economic, societal, and technological developments. Moreover, the changing nature of both work and people’s attitude has driven an academic need to understand the connection between employees and their place of employment, the role of employees in their career development in that are increasingly mobile and self-direct in their careers. Protean career orientation describes a career tendency presented in one’s career, that is, a tendency for individuals to achieve subjective career success by managing their careers autonomously. PCO has two dimensions: self-directed and values-driven. Self-directed refers to the individual's tendency to self-manage by proactively exploring career choices and making career decisions; values-driven are directed to individuals who take the initiative to pursue goals that are meaningful to themselves, rather than passively accepting the values that organizations and society impose on them. In other words, the values held by individuals are the driving force for their career success in their protean career, and the organization simply provides them with the opportunity to align their career choices with personal values. The measurement of PCO includes two types: two-factor structure and single factor structure. The two-factor structure contains a self-directed scale and a value-driven scale developed by Briscoe et al. (2006). Many studies have used this scale. However, a few studies have shown that this scale has some ambiguity, and the two dimensions in this scale are not clearly differentiated (De Bruin et al., 2010). Further, the scale with a two-factor structure has been simplified by Baruch (2014) into a scale with a single factor structure . The article generalizes six influencing factors from individual and situational dimensions: demographics, proactive personality, work orientation, organizational learning climate, social support and social culture. For example, different sexes have different effects on PCO. Some studies have shown that women are more likely to have PCO than men. This article also reviews research conducted to unveil the effects of PCO on career success and job attitudes. For example, PCO has a significant positive impact on subjective career success, and has no significant effect on objective career success. In terms of the impacts on job attitudes, it has been found that PCO can affect the employee's organizational commitment but also increase their intention to quit. By reviewing the literature on the subject of PCO, we have found that there are some shortcomings in this area that need to be remedied in future research: (1) to build a clear and widely accepted theoretical framework of PCO that can withstand verification of the empirical study; (2) to consider whether these scales of PCO are valid in other cultural contexts, such as China; (3) to study the antecedents of PCO from different perspectives; (4) to explore the impact of PCO from the organizational level; (5) and to use the method of longitudinal research to explore a dynamic evolution of PCO process.