With the increasing competition in the labour market, the characteristics of the attainable occupational alternatives do not necessarily match the individual's image of an ideal career, so individuals are required to make compromises in their career choices. Career compromise is very important for individuals to realize their career development and decrease the pressure of social employment. However, there is a lack of a systematic overview of the study of career compromise. It is necessary to summary and prospect the existing researches for the effectiveness of occupational intervention and the improvement of employment rate. The current research on career compromise is mainly based on the concept of career compromise of Gottfredson and Gati, definition on career compromise of Gottfredson is mainly based on the circumscription and compromise theory, and Gati’s is mainly based on the decision theory. There are several differences between the two concepts of career compromise in the dimension of compromise, the basis of decision-making and the continuity of theoretical basis. At present, methods to measure career compromise could be divided into two types, questionnaire method and experimental method. Scales include single dimension scale and multi dimension scale. In addition, because of the diversity and complexity of the content of career compromise, scholars have different treatment of the measured data, for example fuzzy method and multi-attribute method. The influencing factors of career compromise are divided into three aspects. The first is the Gottfredson's order of compromise on career interest, social prestige and sex type. Secondly, the influence of individual's own and external factors on compromise. Individual influence factors inlude single factor effect (i.e, family obligations) and multi factors’ interaction effect (i.e, environment conditions and interest). Third, some external factors such as Industry tradition and friendship also have an impact on career compromise. Several studies have investigated the consequence of career compromise. Specially, career compromise has been found to facilitate individual’s negative affect, goal disengagement and reengagement behaviors and job burnout; and it could depress individual’s positive affect, work-related satisfaction, perceived employability, well-being and occupational commitment. Further, discrepancy theory, goal setting theory, social cognitive theory and person-environment theory provided the theoretical explanation for the underlying mechanism of the career compromise outcome relation. For example, discrepancy theory was used to explain the relationship between career compromise and affect, goal setting theory was used to explain the relationship between career compromise and perceived employability, social cognitive theory was used to explain the relationship between career compromise and career behaviors, person-environment theory was used to explain the relationship between career compromise and job burnout. In addtion, there are some boundary conditions from self and external will influnce the effect of career compromise to consequence(i.e, social capital). Finally, we demonstrate three directions for future research, First, future research could integrate the different path between career compromise and career behaviors, and reveal the mixed effects of them. Second, with the rapid development of information technology, people's career attitude has changed dramatically. So, in the future research, the boundarylessness career attitude can be considered as the boundary condition. Third, family and organization environment are all important environments for the development of individual’s self-concept, future research could explore the influence of intergenerational support and leader-follower fit on career compromise.