The Influential Factors And Impact Of College Students’ Career Adaptability

As the situation of employment is getting grimmer and grimmer year by year, the employment of college students has called the attention of nearly all people in the society. During college time, the main task for college students is to get fully prepared for their career. Career adaptability is a core concept for measuring the preparation for career. It illustrates college students’ ability of keeping balance between themselves and environment while their character and the outside environment are changing at the same time. At present, the studies of career adaptability are mainly focused on the construction of theory structure and the scale development, and the ones on the factors that affect the career adaptability and the outcome variable are quite rare. Also, we need to prove its importance and figure out the method of improving it before we apply the career adaptability into practice. No matter for the theory study or application, it is urgent for us to do some empirical study on the influential factors and impact of college students’ career adaptability.In this study, we selected full-time undergraduate university students as the research object. Using questionnaire survey, we collected the data from 537 college students in Beijing and some other provinces. With SPSS 18.0 and AMOS 7.0, we analyzed data by using descriptive statistics, T test, analysis of variance(ANOVA), correlation analysis, reliability analysis, regression analysis and confirmatory factor analysis(CFA). Our research analyzed the overall level of college students’ career adaptability and the distribution among different demographic variables at first, then focused both on the influential variables that affect college students’ career adaptability including the internal factors(including personality and achievement motivation), and the external supports(social support), and its impacts on improving their life satisfaction and employment performance. The main results are as follows.1. The overall career adaptability level of college students is a little higher than the average level(score 3). The career adaptability or the sub-dimensions are significantly different among different majors, grades, academic performance, hometowns, attendance in social practice activities and family social economic status.2. Personality has significant influence on college students’ career adaptability. Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness can positively predict career adaptability, while neuroticism shows no significant influence. Openness and conscientiousness are better predictors among the 4.3. Achievement motivation has significant positive influence on college students’ career adaptability, mainly reflected in the dimension of pursuit of success.4. Social support has significantly positive influence on college students’ career adaptability. Among the 3 support sources, friends support is the strongest predictor, followed by family support.5. Career adaptability can significantly predict students’ life satisfaction, the higher the former, the stronger the latter. Confidence is the most significant predictors, followed by career control.6. Career adaptability can significantly predict senior students’ employment performance, mainly for the significantly positive influence from confidence dimension.