Career Choice and Calling

Abstract

This study examines the extent to which a sense of calling affects career choice attitudes. Drawing from social cognitive career theory, the study tested the extent to which calling is related to career outcome expectations, interests, and goals. Participants were asked to identify a job that they wanted to perform and completed a questionnaire assessing their attitudes toward the career. We conducted structural equation modeling analyses to test our hypotheses. The results suggest that calling provides unique predictive power beyond self-efficacy for career outcome expectations, interests, and goals. Calling was a stronger predictor than self-efficacy of outcome expectations and interests, but a weaker predictor than self-efficacy of goals. Calling moderated self-efficacy such that self-efficacy was less predictive of outcome expectations when calling was high. The study improves our understanding of career choice attitudes and provides an improved framework for practitioners to draw on when mentoring students or developing career support programs for science, technology, engineering, or math education.