The Role of Thinking Styles in Career Development Among Chinese College Students

Beyond person-environment congruence: Career adaptability, career personality styles, and thinking styles

The main objectives of this study were to explore the relationship between career personality styles and career adaptability and the role of thinking styles in such relationship. Eight hundred and eleven Chinese students, who were trained as pre-service kindergarten teachers, responded to the Career Personality Styles Inventory, the shortened Thinking Styles Inventory-Revised, and the Career Adapt-Ability Scale - Short Form. Results suggested that the career personality styles (i.e. social, enterprising) that fit the vocational environment of kindergarten teaching the most positively predicted the students' career adaptability, both directly and indirectly through creativity-generating thinking styles. Moreover, the artistic and investigative career personality styles indirectly predicted students' career adaptability through creativity-generating thinking styles, while the conventional and realistic career personality styles showed no significant effect on the students' career adaptability. The findings imply that beyond the notion of person-environment congruence, some career personality styles can consistently predict career adaptability through thinking styles. Implications for career counseling and education practice are discussed.

For the Future Sustainable Career Development of College Students: Exploring the Impact of Core Self-Evaluation and Career Calling on Career Decision-Making Difficulty

As one of the important factors to predict future sustainable development, the difficulty of career decision-making has aroused widespread concern in psychological research. Core self-evaluation and career calling have a positive impact on college students’ career development, employees’ organizational behavior, life satisfaction, and life meaning, thus promoting individual sustainable development. Based on the Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), this study mainly discusses the positive role of core self-evaluation and career calling in overcoming college students’ career decision-making difficulties, which provides support for strengthening theory and proposing educational countermeasures. This study investigates the relationship among core self-evaluation, career calling, and career decision-making difficulties for 483 Chinese college students. The results show that core self-evaluation positively predicts career calling, while core self-evaluation and career calling negatively predict career decision-making difficulties. Accordingly, career calling plays a partial mediating role between core self-evaluation and career decision-making difficulties. Therefore, college students’ career calling can be enhanced by improving their core self-evaluation, so as to further solve the difficulties in career decision-making. In the future, effective strategies should be taken to reduce the career decision-making difficulty for students’ sustainable development.