FACTORS INFLUENCING CAREER

CHOICE OF MANAGEMENT
STUDENTS IN DELHI/NCR

APURBO PAUL, SHIVANI JAIN

Bharati Vidyapeeth Institute of Management &

Research, New Delhi, India
ABSTRACT

Purpose – The study sought to investigate the factors that influence the career choice of management
students in Delhi/NCR. The paper takes a critical perspective on career ‘choice’, acknowledging the
contested nature of ‘choice’ and identifying career as a socially and historically situated phenomenon.
In addition, the study also shows the relationship of cultural values and career orientation of
management students from Delhi/NCR.

Design/methodology/approach – Participants consisted of 200 students from Delhi/NCR entering

management, who were starting their first year of management studies program. A Self-designed
questionnaire was used to gather data on factors and types of relationships influencing career choice.

Findings –

Research limitations/implications – The data were collected from four management institute in
Delhi/NCR.

Originality/value –

Keywords Careers, Career guidance, Students, Delhi/NCR

Paper type Research

INTRODUCTION

Career choices are a difficult path for every studentsstudent’s life, as they have to decide
for their entire life. Management studies have become a very common options for the
students which leads to a competitive environment and the demand is also increasing
for these graduates. The difficulty of choosing the career increases by the growing age.
A childrenchild can easily choose the career, about what he wants to be in the future
but as the child grows, he finds out the difficulties of choosing the career and following
the right path.

As students attempt to create career selection, they face issues of matching their career
decisions with their skills and tutorial performance. In most cases, the selection of
careers, subjects, and courses of study and also the resultant career methods to follow
are a nightmare for prospective college students. Career selection could be a advanced
call for students since it determines the type of profession that they will pursue in life.
Understanding the explanations that cause the selection of career is vital as a result of
that call establishes expectations for one’s future and will have an effect on one’s
satisfaction with the career.

An individual has to decide the career by analyzinganalysing various factor, it can be

individual factors, cultural values, family background, career expectations etc. A proper
planning, analyzinganalysing, exploring and guidance is required to select the
appropriate career. Management studies has become a most preferred carrier choice
among students. More than 1,00,000 students are studying management studies and
approx. 700 colleges are graduating students in Delhi.

Many youths created wrong career decisions because of inexperience, ignorance, peer

pressure, recommendation from friends, parents and academics, or as a resultsresult of

status they are connected to bound jobs without adequate business guidance and
direction. Therefore, the idea of career development involves the person’s creation of a
career pattern, decision-making methods, integration of life roles, values expression,
and life-roles self-concepts.

Business factors as well as many sociocultural changes have led to dynamic career
preferences among youngsters in Delhi. The main purpose of the current study was to
spot vital factors that influenced the selection of career of scholars following
management studies in Delhi, and the role that numerous individuals and relationships
played in their career selection. Gender variations among the students were additionally
explored. Students tend to know that there are jobs for males and

there are others for females. This perception is because of ineffective job guidance.

Literature Review

Review of the literature will be explored within this part that evaluate and contrast research
in factors that influence career choice decisions and the extrinsic and intrinsic factors.
Specifically, the literature will reveal what factors are important in making career choices by
the management students and which factors are impactful in different contexts and cultures
in the world. These factors eventually all guide to the awareness that career choice is not a
lineal process but that it has factors that are influential in terms of making future plans and
those factors themselves are influenced by the surroundings, external environment, country
situation, family orientation and personal interests.

The word career has been a derivative of French and Latin origin. Its simplest definition is
given by Geciki (2002) as; the occupational, commercial or industrial activity that a person
may adopt during his educational life or in some other part or till his death. Redman and
Wilkinson (2001) clarifies career as the application of a person’s cognition and capabilities,
providing command over profession, timely work expertise and a basis of developing and
bettering business networks. Individuals chose career planning to pursue the professional
objectives, getting informed about upcoming opportunities, their results and their timely
evaluations. It is considered to be a beginning in the stages of career choices but still of
paramount significance. People prefer the career that could provide them sound basis for an
improved standard of living. the study by Pines and Baruch (2007), and Pines et al. (2002)
across five countries (i.e. Israel, the UK, Turkey, Cyprus, and Hungary). Students opting for a
managerial career may be similar in certain respects, irrespective of nationality. The important
influence of “father” in career decision of Indian students may be understood in the context
of a largely patriarchal society. The fact that the majority of the students had a professional
background, their father being an executive/ professional, may also have influenced their
career choice. Numerous studies have shown similarities between parents’ occupations and
their children’s career aspirations (Barling, 1990; Trice and Knapp, 1992). The Indian MBA
students had a mix of both cultural values, they showed a definite preference for collectivism,
thus supporting Hofstede’s (1980) findings. Several other studies suggest that the Indian
culture is collectivist (Sinha and Verma, 1987; Verma, 1999; Verma and Triandis, 1998). It is
likely that Indian students who demonstrated high collectivistic orientation may make
individualistic choices in situations that related to the individual’s career (Sinha and Tripathi,
1994).

Similarly, students who showed higher individualism may make collectivist choices in a non-
career context. Indian management students who were high on individualistic values were
not influenced by their family or significant social networks in their choice of career. However,
students who were high on collectivism were influenced by their father in their career choice
decision. Similar findings were reported by Karakitapoglu-Aygu n
̈ and Sayim (2007) in a study
of Turkish MBA students.

In terms of the “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” classification of career choice factors, it appears that
intrinsic factors (such as skills and competencies) were more important for female students in
their choice of management career, while extrinsic factors were more important for male
students. The results may be explained with reference to the traditional view of “managerial
career” as being a “male” profession. Women face barriers to career success not faced by
males (Simpson, 2000) and are assessed under stricter criteria than men (Morrison et al.,
1987).

METHODOLOGY 3.3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Research design provides the glue that holds the research project together. A design is used
to structure the research show how all of the major part of the research project – the sample
or groups, measures, treatments or programme and methods of assignments- work together
to try to address the central research questions. Hence it is clear that research design is the
blueprint for research. It lays down the methodology involved in the collection of information
and arriving at meaningful conclusion from the same, There are many methods for studying
and tackling a problem, but there are no perfect methods. PRIMARY METHOD Primary data
collection is necessary when a research cannot find the data needed in secondary source.
Market researchers are more interested in primary data. The basic means of obtaining primary
information are 85 observation, survey and experiment. The choice will be involved by the
nature of the problem and by the availability of time and more. It is collected directly from
people in organization via questionnaire and survey before being analyzed to reach conclusion
concerning the issues converted in the questionnaire or survey. The data collected personally
through field work. It is a qualitative data consist of various answers and discussions that
comes from the kind of open-ended discussion in the questionnaire. A source of primary data
included personal approaches, surveys, mails, telephonic discussions and meetings with
different students of B-schools. SECONDARY METHOD Before going through the time and
expenses of collecting primary data, one should check for secondary data that previously may
have been collected for other purpose but can be used in the immediate study. Secondary
data may be internal to the B-Schools such as placement department, Documented papers or
many are external to the institute such as published data or commercially available data.
Secondary data has the advantage of saving time and reducing data gathering cost. The
disadvantage is that data may not fit the problem perfectly and that the accuracy may be more
difficult to verify for secondary data that for primary data. Sources of secondary data are
websites, articles, magazines and other projects on the same or related topics.

Sample characteristics and data collection The sample[2] consisted of 93 management

students at the University of Delhi, India, who were starting their first year of a two-year full
time MBA degree program. Questionnaire responses were obtained from 99 students, of
which 93 were Indian citizens. The other six students were foreign students from Nepal, Sri
Lanka and Canada. For the purpose of the present paper, only the responses of the Indian
citizens were analyzed. Hence, the total sample size was 93, of whom 50.5 percent (n ¼ 47)
were male, and 49.5 percent (n ¼ 46) were female. Their age ranged from 20 to 27 years, with
an average age of 22 years and two months. The majority of the students (31.2 percent) were
21 years of age and Hindu (88.2 percent) by religion. All the students were unmarried. The
majority of students (n ¼ 65; 69.9 percent) belonged to families in which the father was
serving as an employee in either a technical or a professional capacity. Only 18 students (19.4
percent) had a business background, with their father being self-employed or an
entrepreneur. Of a total of 93 students, 42 students (45.2 percent) had non-working mothers
and 43 had working mothers, of which 37.6 percent (n ¼ 35) were in the employment of
others, 6.5 percent (n ¼ 6) were self-employed, and 2.2 percent (n ¼ 2) were working part-
time. A total of 43 students came from families where both parents were working, either in
the employment of others or owning their own business. Each student was asked to complete
a questionnaire within the first 20 days of joining the full-time, two-year MBA degree program.
The data for the present article was collected in July 2006. Measures Factors influencing
career choice. The 14-item scale developed by O¨ zbilgin et al. (2004) was used to obtain data
on the degree to which various factors influenced the career choice of the students sampled.
Each item on the scale corresponded to a career choice factor. The reliability of the scale, as
evidenced by Cronbach’s a, was 0.66. Relationships influencing career choice. The influence
of certain individuals (relationships) such as father, mother, friends, colleagues, etc., on
students’ career choice was assessed through a nine-item questionnaire (a ¼ 0:65).
Individualism-collectivism. Cultural values on Hofstede’s individualism-collectivism dimension
were measured using a 16-item questionnaire developed by Triandis and Gelfand (1998).
Cronbach’s a for eight individualism items was 0.59, and for eight collectivism items it was
0.62. CDI 13,4 366 Downloaded by Navneet Gera At 23:17 19 December 2018 (PT) Career
orientation. A 13-item scale developed by Baruch (2006) was used to measure career
orientation, with nine items measuring a protean view of a career and four items measuring
a traditional view of a career. Cronbach’s a for protean items was 0.65, and for traditional
items a was 0.81. Responses on all the questionnaires were obtained on a seven-point Likert
scale where 1 ¼ strongly disagree/not at all important, and 7 ¼ strongly agree/very important.