Editorial Comment:

Focus

The authors used data from 2, 722 British adolescents, ages 14-18 years, to explore whether work-related skills and career role models are associated with career maturity when sociodemographic characteristics (age, socio-economic status, gender, family structure), family support (mother/father involvement), and personal characteristics (self-confidence, academic motivation) are controlled. Questionnaires were distributed anonymously in schools and youth clubs where entire classes or groups attempted to complete them, usually within the school day or youth club setting.

Key findings

This study showed that having a role model and having work-related skills were strongly related to career maturity in adolescents aged 14-1 years, even when family support, feelings of pressure, self confidence, and academic motivation were controlled. Adolescents who reported that they felt pressured about the choices they needed to make about their studies or work tended to score lower on career maturity, whereas adolescents who reported that they had computing skills, work experience, strong job skills, and a career role model tended to score higher on career maturity. Mother/father involvement, academic motivation, and self-confidence, were significant correlates of career maturity at the bivariate level, but lost significance in the multivariate model.

These results demonstrate the importance of acquiring basic work-related skills in adolescence and further support earlier findings that absence of such basic work-related skills is related to being unemployed. They also have important implications for practice because they show that fostering career development in adolescence can be practical and can be implemented.