For the future sustainable career development of college students: Exploring the impact of core self-evaluation and career calling on career decision-making difficulty

Abstract

As one of the important factors to predict future sustainable development, the difficulty of career decision-making has aroused widespread concern in psychological research. Core self-evaluation and career calling have a positive impact on college students’ career development, em-ployees’ organizational behavior, life satisfaction, and life meaning, thus promoting individual sustainable development. Based on the Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), this study mainly dis-cusses the positive role of core self-evaluation and career calling in overcoming college students’ career decision-making difficulties, which provides support for strengthening theory and proposing educational countermeasures. This study investigates the relationship among core self-evaluation, career calling, and career decision-making difficulties for 483 Chinese college students. The results show that core self-evaluation positively predicts career calling, while core self-evaluation and career calling negatively predict career decision-making difficulties. Accordingly, career calling plays a partial mediating role between core self-evaluation and career decision-making difficulties. There-fore, college students’ career calling can be enhanced by improving their core self-evaluation, so as to further solve the difficulties in career decision-making. In the future, effective strategies should be taken to reduce the career decision-making difficulty for students’ sustainable development.