Career planning and self-efficacy as predictors of students’ career-related worry

Shedding light on social-cognitive resources that mitigate master students’ experience of dysfunctional career-related worry before graduation.

What we did:

Based on the career self-management model (CSM; Lent & Brown, 2013), we investigated concurrent and time-lagged direct and mediated relationships between career planning, career-related self-efficacy, and career-related worry among a sample of 482 students shortly before graduation.

What we found:

Using data collected at three time points, a negative relationship was found between career planning (T1) and career-related worry (T3) via career-related self-efficacy (T2). Our findings shed light on the role of career planning and career-related self-efficacy as malleable social-cognitive resources that diminish dysfunctional thinking before graduation in sequential order. The findings imply that career planning and career-related self-efficacy are relevant predictors of affective states and can be incorporated into the CSM.

Link to published paper