Career decision-making and upper secondary school students' interest in studying engineering and technology

Upper secondary students' interest in studying engineering and technology is relatively poorly researched field in Slovenia, however, the number of these professions is decreasing and the demand is increasing, making this field interesting for research. In this master's thesis, we wanted to find out, which professions interest the current upper secondary students the most, and to establish, what kind of perception, opinion, point of view and experience these students have regarding the aforementioned studies. To compare our findings and place them into context, we firstly needed to research, what is the current state in this field. We also wanted to find out, what kind of self-efficacy the participants of the research have and how we can connect it to their choice of study and to what extent it influences their choice. At the same time, we were interested, what motivates them and what emotional needs they have. We compared the state according to gender as well as grade of education. Finally, we suggested, how we could improve the state in this field. In the theoretical part of this thesis, we placed the problem into a context and set a theoretical plan. We got to know the Slovene school system and checked its state. We wanted to find out, which professions are lacking and the state in the number of teachers in engineering and technology. We studied the field of self-efficacy and different theories, which influence the development of an individual. The emphasis was also on the environment factors, mostly the influence of gender and gender stereotypes, which are mostly shown in the shortage of women in engineering. We also researched motivation and career-planning with the help of self-determination theory and career, interest and professional interest for technology and engineering. We studied the emotional needs of individuals as well, because everyone wishes to be accepted and feel good in their society. The empirical part of the thesis follows with research questions. For the purpose of the research, we used a qualitative-quantitative approach of pedagogic research with the main method of questionnaires. We used the LAESE questionnaire and adapted it for our research. We analysed the collected results according to questions and separate variables and searched for correlations, levels of connectivity, etc. with the IBM SPSS programme. With the collected results and the help of theory from the theoretical part of the thesis, we answered the researched questions and aims of this master's thesis. We established that merely a fifth of the respondents is interested in an engineering profession. There was no significant difference in number according to gender, however, the male respondents evaluated themselves better in connection with engineering and technology in all categories of the questionnaire. A statistically significant differences (α ≤ 0.05) appeared according to gender in all categories with an exception in category of dealing with self-efficacy. The comparison according to grades of education and categories showed that statistically significant differences (α ≤ 0.05) appear only among the second and fourth grades, namely in categories of engineering career expectations and engineering self-efficacy. The correlation analysis showed there is a high connectivity between categories engineering self-efficacy I and II, which is a logical turnout, as well as between engineering self-efficacy II and engineering career expectations. We can also stress out the fact that the respondents evaluated engineering self-efficacy I and II below average in the scale of agreeing, which shows that they are not sure about their success in engineering and technology and at the same time, they are not willing to sacrifice their private life. With this master’s thesis we wish to give an insight into state of interest for engineering and technology in Slovenia and establish how to improve this state. We want to find out the level of self-efficacy of current students and how they function in society