Abstract:

Being employable in the 21st century implies managing one's career actively and values-driven. In other words, adopting a protean career attitude will make it easier to anticipate and cope with career transitions or tasks. These attitudes guide career self-management behaviors as networking or knowledge-seeking, which may be considered employability dimensions. Therefore, our study aims to explore to what extent the self-directed and values-driven dimensions of protean attitudes explain career behaviors of networking, career guidance seeking, self-nomination, and opportunity creation. Two hundred eighty-eight (Mage = 21.53, SDage = 4.39) Portuguese university students participated in the study, being the majority women (77.8%). We collected data on sociodemographic issues, protean career attitudes, and career self-management behaviors. Simple linear regressions indicated significant relationships between self-directed and all four self-management behaviors. Meanwhile, the values-driven dimension only explained the opportunity creation behavior. Multiple regression analyses for this last behavior indicated that in the presence of self-directed attitude, values-drives attitude is no longer a statistically significant predictor. Although more studies are needed, these results may guide future career interventions. To promote employability among university students seems relevant to focus on self-directed attitudes work.

Keywords:

Employability, protean career attitudes, self-management behaviors, university students.