Helping students to find their paths: the effectiveness of a newly-developed career guidance course for associate degree students in Hong Kong

Traditionally, colleges and universities leave the job of helping their students to find their career paths to guidance counselors in the university careers centre or counselling centre. However, not all students will visit these centres and many of them therefore graduated from colleges and universities without knowing how to write a CV or introduce themselves in an interview properly, let alone being well aware of their career interests. Even though sub-degree programme providers in Hong Kong aim at preparing their students to articulate to degree programmes and to land on their chosen occupational fields, the career guidance provided may sometimes be inadequate.

In this connection, the institution in which both authors are working has recently developed a one-unit course entitled “Planning for Your Academic and Career Pathways” to better prepare all the freshmen for their future paths. This new course for all Year 1 associate degree students lasts for 13 hours and it covers topics in career planning, job values, job skills, the 21st century job market, personal statements, CV and interview skills. The purpose of this course is to motivate students to start their career exploration and look on how much their interests and values match their career and study plans. To reduce teachers’ workload in teaching this one-unit course, the flipped learning approach was adopted and several e-learning platforms have been employed. To measure the effectiveness of this new course, apart from the traditional teaching evaluation on lecturers’ effectiveness and students’ learning experience, students were invited to complete an online survey comprising several well-established research instruments in vocational psychology, namely, Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy Scale (CDMSE), Career Decidedness Scale (CDS), Occupational Identity Scale (OIS) and Career Exploration Survey (CES) in Week 1 (the first lesson) and Week 7 (the last lesson). 233 students completed both surveys and pair-sample t-tests to investigate if there are any significant changes on these measures of career development in students after taking this course. The results are promising in which significant improvements in all measurements were found in the end of the course. The empirical data from this study will not only be used to inform curriculum revision, but can also provide strong justification for sister institutions to develop similar courses to benefit their own students in the next decade.