Making a good career choice: A decision-analytical intervention to enhance proactive decision-making and career choice self-efficacy in high school students

At the end of high school, teenagers must deal with the first life-changing decision of determining what to do after graduation. For these decisions, adolescents need to be able to make good choices. However, most schools have not yet implemented decision training into their curricula. A new intervention called “KLUGentscheiden!” was developed to train complex decision-making in high school students to close this gap.

The intervention targets three critical components of good decision-making: envisioning one’s objectives, identifying relevant alternatives, and comparing the identified alternatives by a weighted evaluation. We assumed that successfully training those decision-analytical steps should enhance self-perceived proactive decision-making skills. In addition, the training should also enhance self-assessed career choice self-efficacy.

The intervention was evaluated in a pseudorandomized control study, including 193 high school students. The intervention group significantly increased proactive decision-making skills and career choice self-efficacy compared to the control group. Although different long-term evaluations are still pending, the KLUGentscheiden! intervention provides an essential tool for training complex decision-making in high school students. It also has the potential to apply to other career choices of young individuals, such as choosing majors, a final thesis, a job, or a field of work.

Siebert, Johannes U., Becker, Maxi; Oeser, Nadine. “Making the right career choice: A new educational tool to train decision-making proactivity in high school students” (Decision Sciences Journal for Innovative Education), https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dsji.12280.

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