The Salience of a Career Calling Among College Students: Exploring Group Differences and Links to Religiousness, Life Meaning, and Life Satisfaction

The authors examined the degree to which 1 st-year college students endorse a career calling and how levels of calling differ across demographic variables and religious-ness, life meaning, and life satisfaction. Forty-four percent of students believed tliat having a career calling was mostly or totally true of them, and 28 % responded to searching for a calling in the same fashion. Students seeking advanced professional degrees were more likely to feel a career calling, and the presence of a calling was found to weakly correlate with religiousness and life satisfaction and moderately correlate with life meaning. Practice implications are suggested. In its century-old form, the term calling meant a direct call by God to a religious vocation. Today, this term has grown to take on a variety of meanings and is often applied to both religious and nonreligious career paths (Dik & Duffy, 2009). Within the career literature, relatively little empirical research has been completed to understand the degree to which specific populations endorse this construct and in turn how having the presence of, or searching for, a career calling relates to demographi