Education regarding jobs and future career in high school is very important because not only it helps high school students choose a right career, but also it allocates human resources efficiently. In particular, identifying the determinants of future career decisions can be important subjects in that it enables us to predict the direction and persistence of career decisions. In this study we examine the role of personal characteristics, family backgrounds and school system in determining future career decisions of high school students in Korea. We also examine how internal and external motives affect career decisions of high school students.
Our sample to be examined includes 4,000 high school students and their teachers and families in KEEP. We create an index of the level of career decision using information about whether a student decided his/her future career, how much information a student obtained before making a career decision, how confident a student is about the career decision, etc. The index is then regressed on students' personal characteristics, family backgrounds and school variable using an ordered probit model.
The results obtained in this study are as follows. First, personal characteristics such as internal motives, academic performance, self identification and family background variables such as conversation with parents and career information search are found to influence the level of career decision of regular high school students. Second, concerning vocational high school students, teacher gender, lectures about future career as well as internal motives are found to be very important in explaining the level of career decision. In particular, for vocational high school students, internal motives turn out to be important only when students decide to advance to universities, while external motives are found to be important when they decide to get a job.
It is important to study how career decisions are made since it allows us to understand the processes of career decision making. One of the obtained results is that vocational high school students show different motives between deciding to go to a university and to get a job. This implies that fostering internal motives of students and employment promotion activities in vocational high schools may be conflicting each other. This study, in addition, provides various implications coming from the obtained results on Korean vocational education.