Sustainability of Youth Careers in Romania—Study on the Correlation of Students’ Personal Interests with the Selected University Field of Study

Abstract

Sustainable use of resources is an act of social responsibility, in which all the factors that benefit or exploit that resource are involved. Education, with its most important goal—finding a place in the labor market in the form of a career—is a process that involves multiple financial, human and institutional resources. The present study analyzes to what extent the careers that young people in Romania build correlate with their personal interests. Using the Holland Test, the interests of a group of engineering students were identified. It was observed that there are three typologies of people: those who have chosen their field of study according to their interests, those who are interested in interdisciplinary fields of which engineering is a part and the third category, who have no interest in the field of engineering. The percentages of the three categories are approximately equal, which should determine the change of educational policies in Romania, in the sense of promoting and practicing career guidance for the early discovery of young people’s interests and the sustainable convergence of all resources towards them.