Adolescents Adjust Vocational Aspirations When Getting Close to a Developmental Deadline

Opportunities to attain important life goals are sequenced in age-graded trajectories that wax and wane throughout life. A prime example of such age-graded opportunity structures is the transition from school to work. The institutions of vocational training in Germany closely scaffold this transition and provide developmental deadlines for attaining the critical transition, namely finding an apprenticeship position. Adjustments of vocational aspirations are investigated with regard to the social prestige of three indicators of aspirations, “dream job, ” “vocation I am interested in, ” and apprenticeships applied for. Findings indicate that adolescents progressively adjusted their “dream job ” to “job I am interested in ” as the deadline approaches. Moreover, overall adolescents matched their school performance to the social prestige of apprenticeships for which they applied. Boys and girls whose motiva-tional orientation did not match their gender prototype attained particularly high levels of achievement and aspiration. C © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA) Key Words: school-to-work transition; primary control; secondary control; developmen-tal regulation; developmental deadline; adolescence; goal adjustment; vocational aspiration; risk taking; motivation. In industrialized societies, the transition from school to work is a period of in-stability with heightened potential for downward as well as upward mobility, thus The longitudinal study on “Developmental Regulation in the Transition from School to Work ” is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG Grant He 3068/3-1). We are much indebted to the other members of our project team, Bettina Hollube, Gabriel Nagy, Olaf Köller, Nicole Radzei, and Regina Wolf, for their manifold contributions to the project. Moreover, this work has greatly profited from the most conducive and stimulating academic setting at the Max Planck Institute for Huma