Many Roads Lead to Rome: Researching Antecedents and Outcomes of Contemporary School-To-Work Transitions

(2021) - Rebekka Steiner, Andreas Hirschi, Jos Akkermans

Journal: Journal of Career Development
Link:: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08948453211063580
DOI:: 10.1177/08948453211063580
Links::
Tags:: #paper #Transition #school-to-work
Cite Key:: [@Steiner2021]

Abstract

The school-to-work transition is the first significant career transition for many individuals and represents a critical developmental task in adolescence and early adulthood (Dietrich et al., 2012). Thus, it is not surprising that over the past 25 years, the transition from school to work has received considerable attention in the fields of career development and vocational psychology (e.g., Akkermans, Blokker, et al., 2021; Blustein et al., 1997). This research illustrates that a successful school-to-work transition has important implications for long-term career and personal development. For example, success in this transition relates positively to later work-related outcomes, such as job satisfaction (Pinquart et al., 2003), and well-being outcomes, such as life satisfaction (Litalien et al., 2013). Today, the topic is highly relevant, especially as the transition itself has been fundamentally changing over the past years (Akkermans, Blokker, et al., 2021; de Vos et al., 2019), and moving from education into the labor market has become far from being a trivial and automatic transition (e.g., Krahn et al., 2015). For example, in the context of the rapidly changing business and labor markets accelerated by the fourth industrial revolution (Hirschi, 2018), adolescents and young adults have to increasingly cope with unpredictable career trajectories (Akkermans et al., 2015). There is also greater variability in the definitions of what comprises a “successful” school-to-work transition. For example, beyond finding employment, also wellbeing and meaningfulness have become essential hallmarks of a “successful” or “adaptable” (Akkermans, Blokker, et al., 2021) school-to-work transition.

Notes

“Becoming prepared for a career is necessary to master career transitions, such as the school-to” (Steiner et al., 2021, p. 2)

“work transition.” (Steiner et al., 2021, p. 2)

“The jingle fallacy (i.e., using the same term to refer to different aspects of career preparedness) and the jangle fallacy (i.e., using different terms to refer to the same aspect of career preparedness) are problematic for the field of school-to-work transition research: they cause fragmentation in the literature and suggest that there is a lack of consensus on how becoming prepared for a career should be defined, operationalized, and measured” (Steiner et al., 2021, p. 2)

“perspective of sustainable careers (de Vos et al., 2020), suggesting that happiness, health, and productivity are essential indicators of an adaptive school-to-work transition” (Steiner et al., 2021, p. 2)

“Sawitri and Creed contribute to the ongoing agency-context debate in the school-to-work transition literature by examining the interaction between an indicator of individual agency (i.e., adolescents’ proactivity) and a contextual factor (i.e., the degree of congruence between adolescents’ and their parents’ regarding career matters)” (Steiner et al., 2021, p. 2)

“findings indicate that a favorable context in the form of high parent-adolescent agreement regarding career matters can buffer against limited agency in the form of low proactivity, which would otherwise prevent the building of self-efficacy beliefs and positive outcome expectations among adolescents” (Steiner et al., 2021, p. 2) something to replicate in 16 NCDS sweep

“Grounded in motivational systems theory, Kim and Lee examine within- and between-person relations of positive and negative emotions with subjective (i.e., subjective ratings of job search behaviors) and objective (i.e., number of resumes submitted) pre-transition behaviors among Korean college students” (Steiner et al., 2021, p. 5)

“Findings indicate that the direct and indirect links between career competencies and subjective career success are especially pronounced for graduates who are strongly satisfied with the choice of their academic program” (Steiner et al., 2021, p. 5)

“he direct positive effect of career competencies on subjective career success is particularly pronounced when graduates are unsatisfied with other aspects of their academic education. In other words, when graduates are unsatisfied with the level of achievement of their career goals during the program, or when they are unsatisfied with the occupational prospects that the program offered, they feel less successful” (Steiner et al., 2021, p. 5)

“Overall, these studies highlight that individual agency is an important driver of school-to-work transition success” (Steiner et al., 2021, p. 8)

“stress the relevance of contextual factors” (Steiner et al., 2021, p. 8)