Relationship Between Students' Autonomy and Career Readiness

While colleges and universities have historically emphasized holistic education, employers continue to be concerned that students are missing core elements of the non-technical skills which are necessary to be successful in the workplace. Organizations such as the National Association of Colleges and Employers as well as the Association of American Colleges and Universities have provided data that reflect the disconnect between what employers expect and what recent graduates possess in terms of their non-technical skillsets. Despite efforts to prepare students for early career success based upon known employer expectations, the current disconnect demonstrates that an increased understanding about the gap in graduates? skills is needed. To better recognize gaps in skill development, it is important to understand where students are developmentally. This study?s purpose is to understand how student development affects the students? perceived prioritization of the importance and their proficiency with technical and non-technical skills in order to provide a means to promote student growth toward employer expectations.An electronic survey was used to gather information about the students? level of autonomy, how students prioritized the importance of career-readiness competencies, and the students? proficiency level for each competency. The survey had three sections: demographics, career-readiness competencies, and The Iowa Developing Autonomy Inventory. Descriptive statistics were used for the Iowa inventory and career-readiness competencies in order to gather information related to the mean, range, variance, and standard deviation. After the descriptive statistics were calculated, a test of differences between means was created using a t-test (a = .05) for each subscale and career-readiness competency in order to study possible differences among classification, age, academic discipline, and gender. Finally, a seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) was used as the main statistical technique to analyze the relationship between the Iowa inventory subscales and the career-readiness competencies