How to successfully manage the school-to-work transition : integrating job search quality in the social cognitive model of career self-management

Over the past years, the school-to-work transition has become more volatile and complex, making it more important for graduates to take charge of their careers and to engage in self-regulatory activities. A central factor in successfully navigating this transition is job search. Integrating the social cognitive model of career self-management with recent theorizing on job search quality, we posit that a high-quality job search process (i.e., goal establishment, planning, goal striving, and reflection) will lead to key transition outcomes (i.e., job attainment and perceived fit) for graduates. We incorporate pre-, during, and post school-to-work transition variables to provide new insights about proximal antecedents, processes, and outcomes of this transition. In our in-tegrated model, we propose that job search quality is determined by graduates' job search self- efficacy, outcome expectations (i.e., perceived labor market demand), personality (i.e., consci-entiousness), and context (i.e., social support). In turn, job search quality is expected to predict job attainment and perceived fit. The hypothesized model is tested in a sample of 255 Flemish graduates using a three-waved design. Results show that job search self-efficacy and conscien-tiousness related positively to most job search quality dimensions, and indirectly to job attain-ment. Goal establishment and goal striving positively predicted job attainment, whereas goal establishment was a significant predictor of perceived fit of the obtained job. These results can help graduates to conduct a higher-quality job search, and help career counselors to design more effective training programs