Career Anxiety

Abstract

Considering the continuous changes in the vocational world today, career anxiety increases to become a more serious threat today than ever. Therefore, the career psychological community must determine the best approaches to handle this situation. This paper focuses on two major career anxiety factors: professional knowledge and career adaptability. Hence, it is important to determine the nature of both the variables’ relationship with career anxiety and the level of influence that one has on career anxiety and other factors. Using a sample size of 440 students from both university and technical and further education (TAFE), the relationships between these variables and career anxiety are determined using a simple career anxiety scale and the Career Futures Inventory – 9 scales. The results portray a negative correlation between career adaptability and anxiety, but both positive and negative correlations between professional knowledge and career anxiety, depending on career adaptability. The paper concludes on the essentiality of career adaptability even for other variables such as professional and perceived knowledge to be used against career anxiety.

Introduction

Based on the changing dynamics and elements of the global corporate and work spheres, career anxiety has grown significantly today compared to any other time. For example, some of the quickly changing elements today include the growth of technology, which has consequently led to a decrease in jobs or their limitation to only temporary jobs. Although students' intention while attending universities, technical and furtherer education is to acquire more permanent and sustaining occupations and works, the decreasing number of such permanent jobs has directly influenced the rise of career anxiety today. In these scenarios, career anxiety should not be confused with some of its minor attributes, such as career indecision, which is only a part of career anxiety. Career anxiety can be defined as the feelings of fear and distress associated with the lack of unmet personal and external expectations for career advancement. Career anxiety is the totality of failed expectations from parents or personal expectations, fear of finding a permanent paycheck, or the lack of knowledge or indecision in advancing one's career. The latter describes career indecision, which sources from a change in career path or the lack of an initial career path. However, factors such as career adaptability and increased knowledge of the job market highly influence these modern-age psychological problems and can be used to curb the rate of career anxiety for today's generation. Thus, it is critical to determine the influence of career adaptability and job market knowledge on reducing career anxiety and the varying elements in both relationships. 

Hypothesis

Despite the threatening nature of career anxiety due to ongoing factors in the occupational world, different principles of occupational psychology have different influences on reducing the problem. In this case, the paper's focus is given to perceived knowledge and career adaptability, which have become some of the most crucial elements in vocational psychology. Hence, the underlying hypothesis of the study states that career adaptability and professional knowledge have a parallel and invert relationship with career anxiety, with career adaptability having more influence over ensuring limited career anxiety. In this case, some of the specific research questions that the study answers are:

1. What influence does professional knowledge have on career psychology, and how much does it influence career anxiety

2.What influence does career adaptability have on career psychology, and how much does it influence career anxiety?

Literature Review

With the growing shifts in the job market, career anxiety has long been a growing interest for many studies and scholarly literature. For example, Savickas (2011) explains the already existing vocational environment and culture of workers finding jobs in projects and only finding "jobless work" that causes socio-economic instability and the methods to deal with the new world problem. In this case, the term "jobless work" defines the project-to-project-based recruitment system that most firms and organizations have applied, therefore lacking a permanent source of economic stability. However, despite this growing problem in vocational psychology, career counselors must determine the best principles to help their clients move on to the next phase of their lives by ensuring that workers grow and increase their employability. Savickas (2011) argues the need for shifting career counseling from employment to employability. Furthermore, more studies have considered the necessity of employability and its foundational elements. Kwon (2019) describes some of the major predictors and signifiers of employability, including work volition and career adaptability. The study illustrates the evolution of career adaptability in the new world, which has developed from simply increasing one's knowledge of the job market and receiving promotions to also foundationally gaining dynamic competencies for each line of work. In this case, these competencies include developing one's mental and behavioral patterns as needed with the changing vocational systems to address all challenges faced in the particular line of work. On the other hand, work volition answers career indecision by freely choosing a career path despite external pressures (Duffy et al., 2012). Therefore, employability and its components are arguably termed the principal answer in vocational psychology for career anxiety. 

Still, two significant components of employability with a primary role in career anxiety include knowledge and adaptability. A study by Tien & Wang (2017) describes employability, together with career adaptability and resilience, as key constructs for workers in today's society and their psychological well-being. The study determines the relationship between adaptability and psychological well-being, concluding that the latter depends on career adaptability. Also, professional knowledge, both concerning the job market and professional skills, is considered a highly prioritized component of employability (Tien & Wang, 2017). Other components include career planning, personality traits, and identity and adjustment. Therefore, career adaptability, professional knowledge, work volition, and resilience are among the greatest assets for ensuring life satisfaction for workers facing new occupational problems, with career adaptability being greater than job market knowledge. 

As a key answer to career anxiety, career adaptability is a fundamental trait for today's workers to find occupational satisfaction. Duffy (2010) identifies career adaptability and perceived control as fundamental traits and mediators to other elements of vocational psychology. The study first defines career adaptability as a worker's preparedness to manage the various roles that a career demands from them, together with any arising unpredictable demands. More so, through a sample study of almost 2000 students, the study concludes that a sense of control is described as one of the major attributes of career adaptability alongside exploration, knowledge, and competency. Workers with a greater sense of control will lean towards adaptability. Additionally, traits such as self-confidence, self-esteem, and positivity were attributed to a sense of control, which made them less likely to deal with career anxiety. Weinstein, Healy & Ender (2002) further agrees with this conclusion concerning the correlation between a sense of control, adaptability, and career anxiety. The study, which samples women with low-level jobs, concluded that those with high perceived control, which is concurrently present with high adaptability and coping, have lower anxiety reported. Therefore, studies have shown the necessity of career adaptability and its attributed component of perceived control in lowering career anxiety and indecision. 

Due to the growing psychological problem today, more research has determined the solution to career anxiety and other components necessary to ensure continuous life satisfaction and limited anxiety despite lacking job security. McIlveen, Burton & Beccaria (2013) describe the career future inventory as a new measure of employability amongst others, such as a sense of career knowledge, adaptability, and optimism. The study shows the future inventory of a feasible approach in counseling and academic intervention for students and workers facing vocational anxiety. Rottinghaus et al. (2012) further validate career futures inventory with its various components such as hope, self-awareness, and self–efficacy. Also, this study uses measures such as occupational awareness, positive and negative career perspectives, and support to determine attitudes and career anxiety, laying more foundation for counseling. Thus, vocational awareness and perceived knowledge are major measurements of career anxiety. Other components related to career future inventory and adaptability include cognitive capacity, self-esteem, hope, personality, and optimism, which can all be used as measures for adaptability (Rudolph, Lavigne & Zacher, 2017). On the same basis, components such as career satisfaction, career identity, calling, income level, employability, and career anxiety can be given as results for each worker's or student's adaptability level. Factors such as calling can raise one's level of concern, curiosity, and confidence to obtain more professional knowledge (Douglass & Duffy, 2015). Therefore, some of the principal solutions to career anxiety for long-term life satisfaction include adaptability, career futures inventory, and the various measurement systems to diagnose career anxiety and find practical solutions for the condition. 

 Methodology

Participants

In order to satisfy the paper's hypothesis, the paper collects and analyzes data from a sample set of 440 students from both university and technical and further education. In this case, from a total of 200 university students and 220 technical and further education students, and a total of 220 male students and 200 female students, interviews and online questionnaires are taken for each student to determine the various levels of career adaptability, professional knowledge, and career anxiety according to the set scales. The sample set is characterized by a mean age of 21.45 years, with a mean male age of 19.61 and a mean female age of 22.10, and a respective standard deviation of 8.12, 6.16, and 7.47, respectively. Therefore, results are taken for the gender and student type subsets, either university students or technical and further education students. 

Materials To proceed with the study, some necessary materials include the different scale systems for career anxiety, professional knowledge, and adaptability. In this case, the career futures inventory 9 (CFI-9) is used to determine each child's knowledge level and career adaptability through their respective three elements, measured alongside career optimism and its three elements (McIlveen, Burton & Beccaria, 2013). The CFI-9 differs from other futures inventory systems, such as the career futures inventory – revised, which has five factors for each respective group. Additionally, to determine each student's level of career anxiety, a simple career anxiety scale with measurements from 1 to 10, describing the different measurements from lack of anxiety to worried students respectively, is used. However, a limitation of this study may include the lack of using subscales for career anxiety which determine the sources of anxiety, such as stimulus-related anxiety, social anxiety, cognitive anxiety, or general vocational anxiety (Muschalla & Linden, 2017). Therefore, through these measurements, adequate data collection is made. 

Procedure

Since the study involves a large sample set, various procedures must be followed. First, to recruit the needed number of students for the sample set, necessary university approvals are required from the university's Human Research Ethics Committee. Having received the approval, necessary logistics such as online advertisements and questionnaires are set up. Hence, participants are drafted through these set-ups, including physical and on-campus meeting points. After enough people are registered for the survey, an online or physical questionnaire is handed over for each student to fill out discretely. Finally, the survey is completed after the necessary data analysis and the results are achieved.

Results

The following major points are highlighted in the results according to the procedure and measurement systems. First, the sample set is observed to have a moderate to a high level of anxiety based on the measurements set, especially for female technical and further education students and male university student subsets. Secondly, a low but positive correlation is seen between knowledge of the job market and career anxiety to determine the influence of professional knowledge on career psychology. However, when professional knowledge is accompanied by adaptability, a high negative correlation is identified between the two variables. On the other hand, a negative correlation is identified between career adaptability and career anxiety, as seen with the negative coefficient value recorded. Also, student subsets with fewer recorded cases of anxiety, such as male university students result from high career adaptability levels in the same subset. Therefore, the results show a negative correlation between career adaptability and career anxiety while recording both negative and positive correlations for professional knowledge and career anxiety, with adaptability being an independent variable.    

Discussion

The results signify the necessity of career adaptability, even for professional knowledge, to curb career anxiety. Knowledge's influence is observed to depend on the level of adaptability each student records. In this case, if a student has a low level of adaptability, they are likely to be negatively affected by more knowledge of their job market and career information. Therefore, career adaptability can be described as a predictor of professional knowledge and competence (Guo et al., 2014). In this case, the lack of career adaptability for students who are aware of the job market and have sufficient knowledge about it may lead to career anxiety since they lack the know-how to navigate the vocational stage and any unpredictable circumstances that may arise. This is similar to Chen et al. (2020), whose study illustrates the need for implementation accompanied by professional knowledge and self-knowledge. Additionally, a negative correlation between professional knowledge and career anxiety depends on career adaptability through calling and other factors, which increase adaptability. Hence, the relationship between professional knowledge and anxiety is dependent on adaptability. On the other hand, adaptability and its various components are inversely proportioned with anxiety. This result means that students who were recorded to have more self-reported career adaptability had less corresponding anxiety indexes. For example, the technical and further education male student subset recorded the highest adaptability, with a corresponding lowest career anxiety index than other subsets. This result is similar to Zhang et al. (2022) study, which concludes with the negative correlation between anxiety and depression and career adaptability. Adaptability is also observed to have more influence over other factors, such as knowledge in this case. Therefore, more emphasis should be given to career adaptability in psychological practice.  

Conclusion

In the field of career psychology, some of the resulting methods to solve career anxiety have more effect than others, such as adaptability's greater effect than perceived knowledge. This study determines the relationship between these two variables and career anxiety. As career anxiety becomes a greater psychological threat, today's practice must determine the most efficient methods to deal with the problem. The study answers this question by highlighting adaptability as an independent variable necessary to combat career anxiety due to its inverse relationship. Greater adaptability reduces the chances of career anxiety. On the other hand, despite the large influence of perceived knowledge on career anxiety, knowledge depends on adaptability to determine the relationship between the two. Where an individual has more adaptability, the relationship between perceived knowledge and career anxiety becomes more inversely proportional. Therefore, despite the necessity of perceived knowledge, it is only beneficial while insisting on career adaptability, which gives more priority to the latter. 

References

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