A Study On The Developmental Characteristics Of Career Maturity Of Chinese College Students

Career maturity is the extent to which individual is ready for coping with career development tasks appropriate to his or her age. Because the situation which takes up an occupation becomes more and more difficult, it is necessary to provide the pertinent career guidance. Career maturity is a important index which could evaluate the stage in one's career development, the study on the career maturity of college students will not only provide theoretic basis for career guidance, but also meet the urgent need for the development of Chinese vocational psychology.The purpose of the study was to explore the development characteristics of career maturity of Chinese college students. Based on the previous research of home and abroad as well as the results of the open-ended questionnaire survey, the career maturity model applicable to Chinese college students was developed firstly. Through exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis of the data from three structured questionnaire surveys, the structure of the Career Maturity Inventory was constructed and the formal inventory was developed. After the examination of reliability and validity of the inventory, it was used as a measure to explore the developmental characteristics of career maturity in a Chinese sample of 2087 college students.The results indicated as following:(1) Career maturity, a structure including many components, could be divided into two dimension — career decision-making knowledge and career decision-making attitude. The dimension of career decision-making attitude included five factors: activeness, agility, confidence, utilitarian and independence. The dimension of career decision-making knowledge included four factors: the knowledge of jobs , knowledge...