Career Maturity and Well-Being as Determinants of Occupational Status of Recent School Leavers

Abstract

The present study tracked a group of Year 12 students 9 months after leaving high school and sought to identify whether age, gender, data on career maturity, psychological wellbeing, and school achievement reported while still at school could be identified as predictors of occupational status. Data on these variables were able to identify broad postschool occupational groupings of school leavers at Time 2 (T2), whether they were in full-time study, full-time employment, or unemployed/part-time employed. Findings support the assertion that career maturity is a predictor of a successful postschool transition. Discussion focuses on the need to explore movements between the occupational groupings and implications for school-based interventions.Changes in the world of work for adolescents create an imperative to prepare individuals with the necessary skills for more complex and multiple job/ career transitions. Early work experience in a full-time job has been the major stepping stone for young people to adult life since the end of the Second World War. However, significant changes in the nature and structure of the work force during the 1990s meant that this stepping stone was largely removed. The proportion of 15-to 19-year-olds with a full-time job fell from 28% at the beginning of the 1990s to 17% by mid-1996. However, data also show that these 15-to 19-year-olds are all not in full-time education. Although the 1980s saw a significant growth in school completion, peaking in 1992 at 77%, the years since then have illustrated an annual decline, to a low

A Moderated Mediation Model of Planned Happenstance Skills, Career Engagement, Career Decision Self‐Efficacy, and Career Decision Certainty

“…Traditionally, career counseling professionals have focused on helping clients to make a career decision by exploring their future lifetime occupation (Patton, Creed, & Muller, 2002;Seifert, 1993;Skorikov, 2007). However, the future cannot be predicted with any dependable degree of certainty.…”

Antecedents and consequences of career decisional states in adolescence

“…For example, Patton, Creed, and Muller (2002) reported that students who leave school to continue on to full-time further study can be characterized while at school as having higher levels of self-reported school achievement, higher levels of well-being, and higher levels of career development knowledge than students who, for instance, entered the labour force. While a number of writers have commented that career indecision may be an ongoing part of the career decision-making process, "a sign of transformation in progress" (Savickas, 1994, p. 54), it is clear that the lower scores on career development related variables reported by young people in the undecidedundecided group warrant particular concern in relation to their career decision-making behaviours and well-being during adolescence.…”

Effects of Orientations to Happiness on Vocational Identity Achievement

“…In recent years, there has been increased interest in investigating the relationship between career development and subjective well-being (Lent, 2004;Walsh, 2008). The importance of this research field is supported by empirical studies (Creed, Prideaux, & Patton, 2005;Hirschi, 2009;Patton, Creed, & Muller, 2002;Skorikov, 2007;Skorikov & Vondracek, 2007a) suggesting a reciprocal relationship between subjective well-being and positive career development. However, little research is available regarding the way that different approaches to achieve subjective wellbeing (often equated with happiness; Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999) are related to career development.…”