Aspirations for Careers in State-Owned Enterprises: Evidence from a Low Middle-Income Country

ABSTRACT

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) play an important role in Vietnam’s economy. It is of interest to policymakers to know to what extent undergraduate college students, who will soon join the labor force, aspire to work for SOEs. Our study is the first to examine the relationships between career aspirations and social support expectations as well as employment self-efficacy, and to conduct regression analyses of the moderation effects of gender, parental background, and family involvement on these relationships. We found that both expected social support and employment self-efficacy are strong predictors of SOE-career aspirations. We also found strong evidence that gender, parental background, and family involvement have moderating effects on the associations of SOE-career aspirations with expected social support and employment self-efficacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Career aspirations
• state-owned enterprise
• Vietnam
• social support
• self-efficacy

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the editors and reviewers for their constructive and valuable comments. We would also like to acknowledge the contributions of student participants in this study. This research is partly funded by the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. An alternative to OLS is to use ordered logit models; the results from OLS and ordered logit models are qualitatively similar. For ease of interpreting the coefficients, we therefore chose to report OLS specifications, as in Halko et al. (2012).

2. Except for MALE’s coefficient (which corresponds with the interpretation of the standardized SSEN), standardization does not change the coefficient of any other variable in the Equation (2)(2) $\mathrm{A}\mathrm{S}\mathrm{P}{\mathrm{N}}_i={\alpha }_i+\beta \mathrm{S}\mathrm{S}\mathrm{E}{\mathrm{N}}_i+\gamma \mathrm{E}\mathrm{F}\mathrm{F}{\mathrm{Y}}_i+\tau \mathrm{M}\mathrm{A}\mathrm{L}{\mathrm{E}}_i+\delta (\mathrm{S}\mathrm{S}\mathrm{E}\mathrm{N}\times \mathrm{M}\mathrm{A}\mathrm{L}\mathrm{E}{)}_i+\sigma \mathrm{F}\mathrm{A}\mathrm{M}{\mathrm{Y}}_i\text{break}+\theta \mathrm{C}\mathrm{O}\mathrm{N}{\mathrm{T}}_i+{\epsilon }_i,$(2) , nor does standardization change the coefficient of any variable in the Equation (1)(1) $\mathrm{A}\mathrm{S}\mathrm{P}{\mathrm{N}}_i={\alpha }_i+\beta \mathrm{S}\mathrm{S}\mathrm{E}{\mathrm{N}}_i+\mu \mathrm{E}\mathrm{F}\mathrm{F}\mathrm{Y}+\tau \mathrm{M}\mathrm{A}\mathrm{L}{\mathrm{E}}_i\text{break}+\sigma \mathrm{F}\mathrm{A}\mathrm{M}{\mathrm{Y}}_i+\theta \mathrm{C}\mathrm{O}\mathrm{N}{\mathrm{T}}_i+{\epsilon }_i,$(1) .

3. Because there is no statistically significant difference in career aspirations between those who discuss career aspirations with others outside the family and with nobody, we combine these two groups.