From College Student To Civil Servant: A Qualitative Study Of Career Adaptability

In recent years, more and more attentions have been taken on the employment of college students in China. Though raising the employment rate of college students is an urgent issue for higher education institutions, more importance should be given to the issue of college students'career adaptability. Nowadays, civil servant has become a career admired by the public, many college students have applied for the civil servant entrance examination. Therefore, the career adaptability of new civil servant has been a significant research topic on college students'career adaptability. The subject of this research is new civil servant graduated from full-time colleges and universities up to three years ago. We did the research from the angle of role change from a college student to a civil servant. The qualitative research method can be applied here because of the research purposes. Face-to-face interview and group interview were used to explore the information we needed. We summarized three kinds of role-change from a college student to a civil servant and nine ways to adapt the process of role-change according to the categorization of the information from interviews and to theoretical analysis. During the process of role-change, individuals experienced the change from a free learner to an obedient, from an openness-oriented learner to a conservativeness-oriented learner, and as well as from a customer to a servant. Individuals applied nine adaptive methods, including drawing lessons from others'experiences, on-the-job training, explicit aspiration about the job, thinking from the angle of the others, stimulation, objective evaluating the matching degree between individual and the occupation, voluntarily socializing, ceremony-oriented, self-repositioning.