Examining Senior High Career Decision Making
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
Rationale
Good decision-making is a skill that is very important. This can be easy for some of the people but tough for the others. It is sometimes confusing and can make you anxious. And the reason is that we have an abundance of choices, both with the simple things in life and the serious things in life (Sapadin, 2014). People tend to get stuck in not knowing what their life purpose especially to the career they would pursue. This is no surprise since your life will be engrossed with what your future work will be by your career choice (Paul, 2012).
Career decision making is mostly regarded as a method that entails identifying alternatives, gathering information, weighing the options, selecting one choice, and implementing the chosen alternative. Individuals may use different decision-making styles depending on the particular decisional situation. In her classification, six state-specific styles are identified: logical; hesitant; intuitive; emotional; no-thought; and compliant (Arroba, 1977). But in making a decision there can be also barriers THAT can occur for a variety of reasons, often intertwined , frequently not immediately obvious, these are information, experience, social/relational factors, and personal/emotional. (Gilles-Thomas, 1989)
The process of aligning educational requirements with career choices has grown in difficulty because the world is becoming a global village and the problems surrounding work such as career decision making, work adjustment and career education requires more attention than before (Feller R. , 2003). In Lebanon, university graduates that undertake certain career paths have ill-assorted college majors. (Abdul-Reda & Abouchedid, 2003)
Globally, people tend to make decisions in accordance with some factors. Several factors influence decision making. These factors, including the influence from the parents, experience, cognitive biases, age and individual differences, belief in personal relevance, and an escalation of commitment, influence what choices people make (West, Toplak, & Stanovich, 2008). These factors are also affecting the career path students will take. Sometimes a conflict between these factors subsist. This makes the decision difficult especially because it is for the future career. Thus, understanding the factors that influence decision making process is important to understanding what decisions are made.
In the Philippines, course shifting became a delay for the progressing development of the country. According to Vince Silva (2014) an engineering student, one of the major factors that may have been affecting college students to graduate earlier is the shifting of courses, especially after the first to second year of experience of the student’s studies (Silva, 2014). This is due to the difficult and rough decision of choosing the course to take at the first place that was made. On January 2013, Philippines has 7.1% of unemployment ratings, the highest in the countries from the Southeast Asian nations and 16.9% of it, are college students. This coud be due to the wrong choice of course taken by most of the college students and the unadvised decision making.Insufficient skills and not meeting the capability needed by the companies are one of the primary attributors of the high percentage of unemployment andunderemployment in the country (Philippines Statistics Authority (PSA), 2013).
In Davao region has an unemployment rate of 6% as of 2015 (Weebly, 2014). On the website of Economic ILP (2014), one of the reason why unemployment existed is because undergraduates makes decisions in which they are still taking up college courses that are popular but were previously high in demand. After graduation, these graduates possess skills that are not hight in demand in job market. As such, there is a skill mismatch. This happens because of the inaccurate choosing of the student’s course due to the difficulty of making decision in response of selecting career path.
Previous studies mentioned about the factors that can affect a person in making their own decision. Seemingly, most young people like us find it still difficult to trust our own judgement as far as our career chioce it concern. The K-12 Program of the government has just been implemented with the hope that the problem of missmatch can be solve in the Philippine educational system. With the end view of helping students to be more prepared in making career decision befitting to their interets, personality and competencies, we find it a necessity to embark on another investigation that look into the personal decision of students.Thus,this study is conceived.
Purpose of the Study
The objective of this phenomonological study was to examine the perception and understanding of career choicethat will determine the students’ forthcoming professional prominence. This study focuses on the senior high school students of University of Mindanao Tagum College that will be generally defined as the subject of the study that aims to apprehend the assessment of vocation they wanted to pursue.
Research Questions
- What are the experiences of Grade 11 students who has difficulty in choosing of a career?
- How do the students cope up with the difficulty of choosing a career?
- What are the insights of students who have difficuly of choosing a career?
Theoretical Lens
Career Choice and Development Theories