How to successfully manage the school-to-work transition: Integrating job search quality in the social cognitive model of career self-management

Abstract

Over the past years, the school-to-work transition has become more volatile and complex, making it more important for graduates to take charge of their careers and to engage in self-regulatory activities. A central factor in successfully navigating this transition is job search. Integrating the social cognitive model of career self-management with recent theorizing on job search quality, we posit that a high-quality job search process (i.e., goal establishment, planning, goal striving, and reflection) will lead to key transition outcomes (i.e., job attainment and perceived fit) for graduates. We incorporate pre-, during, and post school-to-work transition variables to provide new insights about proximal antecedents, processes, and outcomes of this transition. In our integrated model, we propose that job search quality is determined by graduates' job search self-efficacy, outcome expectations (i.e., perceived labor market demand), personality (i.e., conscientiousness), and context (i.e., social support). In turn, job search quality is expected to predict job attainment and perceived fit. The hypothesized model is tested in a sample of 255 Flemish graduates using a three-waved design. Results show that job search self-efficacy and conscientiousness related positively to most job search quality dimensions, and indirectly to job attainment. Goal establishment and goal striving positively predicted job attainment, whereas goal establishment was a significant predictor of perceived fit of the obtained job. These results can help graduates to conduct a higher-quality job search, and help career counselors to design more effective training programs.