This study aims to examine how undergraduates’ career adaptability is related with character strength by selecting self-regulatory efficacy and self-directed learning ability as mediating variables. And the researcher formulated the following study ...
This study aims to examine how undergraduates’ career adaptability is related with character strength by selecting self-regulatory efficacy and self-directed learning ability as mediating variables. And the researcher formulated the following study questions: first, what is the direct relationship between undergraduates’ character strength, self-regulatory efficacy, self-directed learning, and career adaptability? Second, do self-regulatory efficacy and self-directed learning mediate undergraduates’ character strength and career adaptability?
To attain the goal, 600 undergraduates attending universities located in Daejeon and Chungnam were selected as study subjects, and total 578 questionnaire sheets were used for final analysis. As a study tool, a questionnaire composed of five areas, character strength, self-regulatory efficacy, self-directed learning, career adaptability, and general characteristics was utilized, and relationship among the four variables was verified with the structural equation model.
Major study results can be summed up as follows: first, character strength showed direct positive effects on career adaptability, self-regulatory efficacy, and self-directed learning ability. Also, self-regulatory efficacy indicated direct positive effects on self-directed learning and career adaptability, and self-directed learning also had direct positive effects on career adaptability.
Second, character strength indicated positive effects on career adaptability with the mediation of self-regulatory efficacy and self-directed learning. This implies that if they develop character strength and improve self-regulatory efficacy, that is, efficacy expectation about their own ability and also practice self-directed learning showing practical will, their character strength may be related to career adaptability more easily. Therefore, to enhance undergraduates’ career adaptability, it is needed to improve self-regulatory efficacy and develop self-directed learning ability along with character strength. In other words, to improve career adaptability, it is necessary to consider those variables synthetically.
This study has the following implications: first, this study is significant in that it deals with character strength which has hardly been considered in advanced career research as its independent variable to figure out how undergraduates’ character strength is related with career adaptability.
Second, by examining affective, cognitive, and volitional aspects in an integrated way from the approach to support undergraduates’ career guidance, this study has laid the foundation to facilitate their career behavior effectively. So far, researches on career have mainly dealt with humans’ cognitive or behavioral characteristics but less frequently considered affective characteristics than the others. Recently, researches on the relationship between affective characteristics and career variables have been conducted, but still, they hardly deal with human’s cognitive, affective, and volitional aspects synthetically. Regarding career, this study is significant in that it has considered character strength as an affective variable, self-regulatory efficacy as a cognitive characteristic, and self-directed learning as the expression of volition at the same time and examined how a person’s internal factors work to the issues related with career in an integrated way.
Third, although mainstream career researches deal with career-deciding self-efficacy as a mediating variable, this study verifies the mediating effect of self-regulatory efficacy, that is, general self-efficacy; thus, it is significant in that it has figured out the roles of general self-efficacy in career research. In particular, this study is also significant in that it has verified the mediating effect of self-regulatory efficacy by analyzing the effect of self-regulatory efficacy only among the constructs of general self-efficacy: confidence, self-regulatory efficacy, and preference for task difficulty.
Key words: Character Strength, Career Adaptability, Self-regulatory Efficacy, Self-Directed Learning