Personal values, social capital, and higher education student career decidedness: a new ‘protean’-informed model

Abstract

This study investigates the role of personal values as motivational antecedents for understanding higher education (HE) student career decidedness among university business school (UBS) students. We propose a new ‘protean’-informed HE student career decidedness model for theorizing how both personal values and social capital mediators (student social capital; personal, social and enterprise skills; access to resources) help in the student-centric and self-directed processes of career decision-making. A mixed-methods study combines a (stage 1) survey of 308 UBS students from 5 (UK) UBS, with results from (stage 2) 4 student focus groups, and (stage 3) 2 staff–student interactive seminars. From an employability perspective, arguably, the ultimate responsibility for becoming a ‘protean graduate’ rests with each UBS student, while the obligation of HE staff is to effectively facilitate and nurture all possible personal growth and skills development opportunities.

Keywords:

• career decidedness
• personal values
• social capital
• enterprise skills
• employability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See Wolff, Knodel, and Sittitrai (1993) for guidance on developing complementary survey and focus-group research.

2 Sub-scales were developed after the EFA and tested as part of the CFA. See the EFA/CFA section for final scales used and accompanying composite reliability scores.

3 Sub-scales were developed after the EFA and tested as part of the CFA. See the EFA/CFA section for final scales used and accompanying composite reliability scores.

4 Table 2 generator courtesy of Dr James Gaskin, http://statwiki.kolobkreations.com/wiki/Main_Page.

5 One UBS preferred not to have a ‘gender’ question in a survey to their students. Therefore, there gender data are only available for 223 students. Gender (on this basis) was excluded from the AMOS modelling, because of missing values. Otherwise, it would have been included as an additional control variable.