高中生职业选择与职业信心：动机、影响和挑战

Becky L. Bobek and Joyce Z. Schnieders Introduction Choosing a career is among the most significant decisions that happen in a person’s life. Thesechoices can impact educational attainment, future opportunities, work success, and personalwell-being. Well-considered career choices that align with an individual’s interests, skills, and/orvalues are associated with higher job performance, higher earnings, and greater job satisfaction(Hoff et al., 2020; Ismail et al., 2019; Neumann et al., 2009). Career choices that are a good fitalso contribute to greater mental health and well-being (Redekopp & Huston, 2018). In contrast, As high school students consider their future career choices, they may face the challenge ofnavigating hundreds of career options and the potential influences of numerous factors whenmaking these choices. Students may rely on tangible occupational factors such as work tasks,job outlook, and salary to help narrow down their options. They may also consider the educationor training needed to enter an occupation, which can either expand or limit their opportunities indifferent career fields. Students may focus on factors such as interests and passions, which canmotivate them to persist through their education and contribute to early career success andlonger-term employment (Allen & Robbins, 2008; Stoll et al., 2017; Volodina et al., 2015). Skillsand abilities are also critical as they affect whether individuals will perform well on the job Career decision-making self-efficacy (confidence in the ability to complete tasks involved inmaking career decisions) is also a particularly salient factor as it relates to students’ careerchoices. On one hand, career decision self-efficacy is positively related to career choice predicting career self-efficacy (Lent et al., 2019). This suggests that there is a mutuallyreinforcing relationship between career choice decidedness and career decision-making self-efficacy. Willhardt et al. (2025) describes this as a “feedback loop from career decidedness toparticipants’ later career‐related self‐efficacy in return. Career decidedness, after all, will fosteractions and experiences that will then serve as learning experiences for future self‐efficacy” (p. Given the importance of career choices for future outcomes, it is critical to learn about highschool students’ perspectives on their choices. What reasons do they think are important toconsider when choosing careers? How influential are people and experiences when makingtheir career decisions? What factors do they agree would be involved in making good fit careerchoices? How are their career choices related to their level of confidence in making good fit To understand students’ perspectives on their career choices, we surveyed a random sample ofhigh school students in Grades 11 and 12 who registered for the July 2024 ACT®National test(see the Technical Appendix for more details on the sample). In this online survey, we askedstudents to share their thoughts on career choices, including what reasons are important toconsider, whether people and experiences are influential, what makes a good fit career choice, Decided Career Choices Related to Greater Career High school students had many thoughts about their future careers. Among the surveyed highschool students, a little over half (53%) indicated that they had decided the occupation theywanted to pursue, 45% had some options in mind but had not decided which to pursue, andonly 2% had not thought about which occupation to pursue. Furthermore, most students felt We also investigated students’ career confidence in three aspects—choosing a career that willbe a good fit, building knowledge and skills needed for their chosen career, and performing wellin their chosen career. Overall, a large majority of surveyed students reported being very ormoderately confident that their career choices would be a good fit for them (83%; Figure 1). An We further explored whether students’ career confidence was related to whether they hadchosen a career to pursue.1Results showed that students who had decided on a career weresignificantly more confident that there would be positive consequences related to these choicesthan students who had not decided on the careers they would pursue (Figure 2). Nearly twice asmany students who had made a career choice were very confident that they would choose acareer that would be a good fit for them compared to students who had not yet chosen theircareer (57% and 29%, respectively). Students with a chosen career are likely expressing To explore factors that were potentially associated with whether a student decided on a careerand associated with students’ levels of career confidence, we conducted logistic regressionanalyses2and multiple linear regression analyses3(see the Technical Appendix for regressionstatistics). These models helped us further understand the relationship between having chosena career to pursue and career confidence. After h