Student’s Career Maturity: Implications on Career Counselling

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the level of career maturity and its implications on career counselling programs. It also attempted to determine whether the variables in this study were related to other variables, such as gender, race, stream of study, academic achievement, and family’s socio-economic status. Total of 1060 respondents from 106 national type secondary schools in Terengganu were identified as research samples and they were selected through a systematic random sampling process. This survey type of research used a questionnaire and interview protocol. The questionnaire comprised of three sub-scales: (i) Personal information and student involvement in career guidance and counselling programs, (ii) Career Maturity Inventory. The Cronbch’s alpha value for career maturity was 0.92. Data was analysed using the descriptive analysis i.e. frequency, percentage, t-Test, mean, and standard deviation. Besides that, inferential analysis such as ANOVA and linear regression was also applied to test the research hypothesis. The result indicates that, in general, career maturity among students ranked from low to medium level. It also found that students’ career maturity was significantly different based on gender, stream of study, academic achievement, and family’s socio-economic status. However, there was no significant difference between students’ career maturity based on race. The report concluded that although career guidance and counselling programs play an important role in the development of the two variables, however, as indicated earlier, gender, stream of study, academic achievement, and family’s socio-economic status also played their roles. The findings have important implications on the development of career guidance and counselling programs in schools.