A new study has found that college students’ beliefs can heavily influence their decisions when it comes to careers. It is a question that parents start asking their children when they are very young, and that is what do you want to be when you grow up? When children are little, they usually have aspirations that seem very ‘romantic.’ They want to be a ballerina, an astronaut, and a unicorn. As they grow and go through more school, their dreams start to change and their answers tend to be a bit more realistic. However, what really makes a child tick, and what factors determine their future career?
Studies are being done to see just how a college student makes the final decision on what type of career they would like to have. According to EurekAlert, a new study is showing that students’ beliefs may have a large impact on the type of career they end up pursuing.
The study was published in Career Development Quarterly and it can be read in full here. They wanted to set out to look at whether beliefs and attitudes had an influence on the career dreams of college students, all who had different genders and sexual orientation.
The researchers look at over 1,000 college students at a midwestern urban university. They wanted to look at their strength of ‘self-efficacy beliefs.’ Self-efficacy beliefs are ideas people have about whether they have a certain ability to achieve a set goal. It is a realistic thought on just what a person believes they can accomplish, and the college students showed interesting results.
The students in the study who held strong beliefs that they could achieve their goals tended to choose careers based on whether or not they had a leadership position within their field. If they were studying business, they sought out positions as a CEO or other higher management.
If a student had higher feminist attitudes, they would also seek out a leadership position, but only for those who were part of the LGBTQ+ community. Students who identified as heterosexual did not have the same result.
The researchers are stating that their findings show that a student's belief system has an impact on their career choice, and they state that this information can be helpful to professionals. They state that career counselors and others can use these findings to help support college students when looking into possible career paths.
Sources: Eureka Alert, Wiley Online Library