Abstract
Career adaptability is an important psychological resource to measure the career development of secondary vocational school students, and it has an obvious relationship with the antecedent variables such as professional identity. However, it remains unclear how professional identity is associated with career adaptability profiles. Using latent profile analysis, this study employed to identify career adaptability profiles among Chinese vocational secondary school students, and explored the relationship between these adaptability profiles and the antecedent variable of professional identity. 630 Chinese secondary vocational school students (453 for boys; 177 for girls) participated in the study. There were three career adaptability profiles identified among Chinese secondary vocational school students: (1) Low career adaptability; (2) Median career adaptability; and (3) High career adaptability. Students who are more engaged in their professional identity—in terms of cognition, affect, and planning—are more likely to have high levels of career adaptability. It indicated that students with a higher professional identity are more likely to belong to higher career adaptability groups. The study broadens our understanding of career adaptability and offers useful insights for school career education and interventions.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the students who participate in this study, the secondary vocational schools in Henan that support our data collection.
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The Pedagogy general project of the National Social Science Fund of China, Project No. BHA200143.
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Conceptualization, Ziluo Yan; methodology, Ziluo Yan, Boyuan Duan; formal analysis, Ziluo Yan, Boyuan Duan; data curation, Kexin Long; writing — original draft preparation, Ziluo Yan, Boyuan Duan; writing — review and editing, Ziluo Yan, Boyuan Duan, Yun Qu, Kexin Long, Guoqiang Li, Shaoling Xu; manuscript rivising, Boyuan Duan, Yun Qu, Guoqiang Li; response letter writing, Ziluo Yan, Yun Qu, Guoqiang Li; project administration, Ziluo Yan. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
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Yan, Z., Duan, B., Qu, Y. et al. Shaping future workers in China’s secondary vocational schools — a person-centered study on professional identity and career adaptability. Curr Psychol 43, 16264–16277 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-05576-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-05576-z