Career Certainty and Major Satisfaction

Abstract

Information-seeking is conceptualized by multiple career decision-making models but has received insufficient attention in the literature. This may be in part due to the difficulty in assessing the amount of information students have acquired about their chosen careers (i.e., their level of occupational knowledge). The present study, sampling 316 college students, modeled this process, with career exploration activities and occupational knowledge as exogenous variables. We expected both exogenous variables to directly and indirectly relate to career certainty and major satisfaction, with self-perceived occupational knowledge, occupational information self-efficacy (defined as the self-efficacy of seeking occupational information during the career decision-making process), and interest congruence acting as mediators. Results showed that career exploration activities indirectly related to the two outcome variables through both self-perceived knowledge and occupational information self-efficacy. Occupational knowledge only related to interest congruence; the latter did not relate to either outcome variable. This study was the first to objectively assess college students’ knowledge of the careers they were actively pursuing and the first to examine that construct along with other important career decision-making variables.