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The purpose of this paper is to expand our understanding about the way women shape their career decisions during their transition to motherhood, through the exploration process, its facilitating factors and outcomes.

A longitudinal, quantitative method was used to investigate the vocational and maternal exploration processes. Workplace, spousal and family support served as facilitating factors, and vocational decisions and well-being as outcomes. Participants were 326 Israeli women during their transition to motherhood.

SEM analysis revealed a good model fit to the data. Workplace support had a positive effect on maternal exploration. Increased maternal exploration was positively associated with keeping working patterns before motherhood, and negatively associated with well-being.

The sample of the current study was limited to highly educated Israeli working women.

The results of the current study can serve career counselors policymakers and organizations in their efforts to encourage first-time mothers to retain their paid work patterns by supporting maternal exploration through creating family-friendly policies.

The current findings have demonstrated that social support factors contribute to the enhancement of the exploration process also in later developmental stages. Furthermore, these findings showed differential effects of managerial support on maternal exploration and vocational exploration.

The present paper examines the effects of two decision‐framing inductions on young adults' set of career options: first, whether young adults use abilities or interests as the grounds for their vocational choices and, second, whether young adults approach the decision‐making task by including all career options to which they feel positively or by eliminating all career options to which they feel negatively.

A 2 × 2 experimental design was used to collect data from a diverse group of college undergraduates.

The results suggest that individuals who choose careers on the basis of skills and who use the inclusion decision‐making procedure are significantly more likely to narrow down their sets of career options.

The paper also suggests that Holland's model of vocational choice (RIASEC) may be differentially useful in guiding students to appropriate vocations for themselves. Students with a “social” profile, for example, have a much larger and more diffuse set of career options available to them than students with “realistic” or “investigative” profiles.

The findings here suggest that the prevalent practice of focusing students' attention on finding activities they like may be less successful in helping students identify appropriate careers than focusing students' attention on their skills and abilities.

The paper addresses a career decision‐making phenomenon that has received increasing attention in the press and among educators.

How do institutional settings and their embedded policy principles affect gender-typed enrolment in educational programmes? Based on gender-sensitive theories on career choice, we hypothesised that gender segregation in education is higher with a wider range of offers of vocational programmes. By analysing youth survey and panel data, we tested this assumption for Germany, Norway and Canada, three countries whose educational systems represent a different mix of academic, vocational and universalistic education principles. We found that vocational programmes are considerably more gender-segregated than are academic (e.g. university) programmes. Men, more so than women, can avoid gender-typed programmes by passing on to a university education. This in turn means that as long as their secondary school achievement does not allow for a higher education career, they have a higher likelihood of being allocated to male-typed programmes in the vocational education and training (VET) system. In addition, social background and the age at which students have to choose educational offers impact on the transition to gendered educational programmes. Overall, gender segregation in education is highest in Germany and the lowest in Canada. We interpret the differences between these countries with respect to the constellations of educational principles and policies in the respective countries.

The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the status of recent Korean four-year college students’ acquisition of vocational qualification certificates (hereinafter “certificates” or “qualifications”), the factors that influence certificate acquisition, and the resulting employment and wage effects.

Regression analysis was conducted on the data from the Graduates Occupational Mobility Survey.

The results showed that females and medicine and education majors had higher rates of vocational qualifications, as did the students in provincial as compared to metropolitan areas and students with high grades. In terms of effects on labor market outcomes, vocational qualifications exert a moderate degree of positive influence on employment rate, wage at the time of initial employment, and current wage (i.e. there is a persistent wage effect).

This study will provide policy implications to decrease youth unemployment in Korea and worldwide as well as to build employment services supporting the acquisition of vocational qualifications across various disciplines.

This paper aims to link findings from laboratory-based decision-making research and decision-making competence (DMC) aspects that may be central for career-related decision-making processes. Past research has identified individual differences in rational responses in decision situations, which the authors refer to as DMC. Although there is a robust literature on departures from rational responses focused on heuristics and biases (H&B) in decision-making, such evidence is largely confined to group-level differences observed in psychology laboratories and has not been extended to the realm of career development and workforce behavior.

By first introducing the concept of DMC and contextualizing it within organizations and the work environment, the paper outlines a review on recent development concerning debiasing interventions in organizations and provides insights on how these may be effective with regard to organizational performance and individual career development.

The contribution presents a perspective to improve knowledge about career decision-making competence (C-DMC) by presenting an approach linking decision-making research to interventions aiming at managing H&B and systematic misperceptions in career processes.

This contribution is one of the few linking decision-making research to the applied context of organizations and of career competences. Moreover, while some research has treated decision-making skills as traits, this contribution provides support to consider them developable as competencies.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the relative effects of participation in cooperative education (co-op) and engagement in reflection upon previous work experiences on undergraduate students’ vocational self-concept (VSC) at graduation.

A cross-sectional survey of graduating students (n=1,483) from a Canadian university was used. Regression models and a mediation analysis were used to test the influence of co-op on VSC through the mechanism of reflection.

Results suggest that both co-op and reflection on previous work experiences have direct effects on VSC, and that reflection partially mediates the relationship between degree type and VSC.

This supports the role of work-integrated learning and self-reflection as critical determinants of students’ work-related learning outcomes, and co-op as a potential container in which reflection may occur.

Students should be given opportunity to reflect on their work-related experiences in order to strengthen their VSC. Institutions may integrate practices related to reflection in order for their students to reap the benefits of deeper learning.

This study represents an inaugural view of the potential links between self-reflection and the development of students’ VSC across both co-op and non-co-op degree types.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships of personality traits and interpersonal relationships with vocational indecision and the mediating role that identity construction plays in the development of those relationships.

Data are collected from 202 college students in Hong Kong at four points in time over a five‐month period.

Personality traits (e.g. locus of control and positive affectivity) and interpersonal relationships (e.g. with parents and peers) are related to the intensity of college students' search for their overall identity, positive anticipation of the work role, and level of identification with the student role. These role identification processes, in turn, are related to lower levels of vocational indecision. The results here support the idea that identity variables do serve as mediators of those relationships.

A more complete identity approach to studying vocational indecision that focuses on both vocational and non‐vocational identities is warranted. Cultural differences in vocational indecision are in need of more research attention, too.

In addition to the common practice of assessing the development of students' vocational interests, another way to prepare individuals for the start of their careers is to assess the development of multiple role identities.

This paper extends the vocational indecision literature by examining how the search for identity, the degree of positive anticipation of the work role, and the development of identification with the student role may mediate the effects of personal dispositions and interpersonal relationships on vocational indecision.

The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence for individual educational investment decisions and to investigate the relative importance of two factors, the type of education (vocational vs academic) and subject area (e.g. commercial or health), in determining variance in earnings.

Using a sample of 1,200 individuals based on the 2011 Swiss Adult Education Survey, Mincer-type earnings equations are estimated. The variance in earnings is decomposed with respect to the two factors mentioned above, which allows to quantify the relative contributions of type of education and subject area to variance in earnings.

The results of the variance decomposition show that subject area explains nearly twice the variance in earnings compared with that explained by type of education.

As results show that earnings variance – and thereby risk – relate more to subject area than to type of education, this study suggests that for individuals caring about the risk of their educational decision the selection of a specific subject area is more relevant than the choice between vocational and academic tracks; in addition, educational policies as part of HRM policies should devote as much attention to the choice of subject areas as to vocational or academic education. This is especially important for companies or countries planning to introduce or to extend vocational education as part of their human resources strategies.

This study is the first to show whether earnings vary more by type of education or by subject area.

This study aims to examine the association between the elements which influence the career decision-making process of tenured hospitality employees and their existing level of career satisfaction (CSat) and future intention.

Adopting a quantitative approach, a questionnaire survey collected data from 564 individuals working as full-time employees at all levels of the hierarchy in four- and five-star hotel establishments in Cyprus. Structural equation modeling analysis, preceded by exploratory factor analysis, was utilized to assess the constructs’ relationships and address the postulated hypotheses.

The results suggest that accurate job-person fit, reflective career awareness and the individuals’ pragmatic occupational perceptions, positively influence their CSat and, subsequently, strengthen their intention to remain and progress within the industry.

The study’s setting, the Cyprus hospitality industry, a Mediterranean seasonal destination with unique operational characteristics, may limit the generalizability of the findings to business environments in other regions.

Insights are of interest and value to stakeholders, including academic scholars wishing to build on this investigation, industry professionals striving to revitalize interest toward relevant professions, career counselors’ vocational decision guidance tactics and strategies and individuals envisioning a prosperous hospitality career.

The paper enhances and enriches our conceptual knowledge of a relatively barren landscape, investigating the behavior of mature employees’ choice of a hospitality career.

This chapter applies three of the most prominent theories in vocational and career psychology to further illuminate the turnover process. Prevailing theories about attrition have rarely integrated explanatory constructs from vocational research, though career (and job) choices clearly have implications for employee affect and loyalty to a chosen job in a career field. Despite remarkable inroads by new perspectives for explaining turnover, career, and vocational formulations can nonetheless enrich these – and conventional – formulations about why incumbents stay or leave their jobs. To illustrate, vocational theories can help clarify why certain shocks (critical events precipitating thoughts of leaving) drive attrition and what embeds incumbents. In particular, this chapter reviews Super's life-span career theory, Holland's career model, and social cognitive career theory and describes how they can fill in theoretical gaps in the understanding of organizational withdrawal.