UNDERSTANDING CAREER PLANNING AND JOB SEARCH BEHAVIORS AMONG UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS: AN EMPIRICAL EXAMINATION OF TWO CAREER THEORIES IN JAPAN AND KOREA

It has gradually been accepted by both academics and practitioners that career education for students plays an important role in higher education across the globe. Career education helps students to enlarge their capacities to make informed career decisions and effective transitions to employment or further study. In light of the school-to-work transition among college students, many face challenges of career planning and job search activities while enrolled in school. It is suggested that adequate career support for students is needed not only by experts and staffs at career centers in educational institutions, but also by academic instructors and faculty professors who interact frequently with students in class. To provide appropriate career guidance for young people through higher education, more educators are encourage to have ample knowledge regarding the mechanisms by which students plan their careers and conduct job search activities to achieve a successful school-to-work transition among them.

Although the number of studies is quite limited, prior work on job search has offered interesting insights into successful job search by students in relation to their career planning. After reviewing relevant literatures, this study identified two distinctive models of job search that can be explained by (1) theory of planned happenstance (TPH: Krumboltz & Levin, 2004; Saks and Ashforth, 2002) and (2) theory of planned behavior (TPB: Ajzen, 1985). The essence of THP is that chance or unplanned events do have a place in the career-planning process, inferring no explicit causalities between career planning and job search behaviors. The TPB model, on the other hand, assumes that specific action or behavior reasonably occurs; that is, a person’s attitude shapes his/her intention, which derives a specific behavior to achieve his/her goal, inferring a clear causality of career planning to intended job search behaviors. However, little research has been conducted to date regarding which of the job search models as described above provides better empirical support among college student samples.

The purpose of this study is twofold. First is to empirically examine the theoretical validation of the two different theory-based, job search models that were developed on from TPH and TPB, respectively. Second is to test a cross-cultural compatibility of these job search models in East Asia, especially between Japan and Korea. The result, based on university college student samples from Japan (n = 175) and Korea (n = 172), indicated that both Japanese and Korean samples fitted significantly better with the TPB model than with the TPH one. Moreover, a multi-group test for the TPB model between Japanese and Korean samples supported an invariance of the model across two groups, providing strong support to a cross-culture validity of the model. Findings are used to discuss the effectiveness of planned behaviors for applicants’ job search in East Asia. We also argued contributions that this study has made to job search literatures in general as well as to career education practices in particular.