Factors Influencing Career Preference Essay

2.0 Introduction
This chapter mainly contains three sections. The first section discusses about the general concepts and definition adopted in the current study. The second section basically explains on the theoretical framework of the study and how the theories fit into the study. In the last section, a review of the past studies on the factors that influence the career preference of the students is examined in depth. The literature review particularly emphasized on how students’ personality type may influence their preferences on certain type of jobs, activities or occupations. 2.1 Definitions and Concepts
The definition of career has been changing from time to time. In the past, the term of career is mainly related to paid employment

The concept were first introduced by Frank Parsons in 1909. According to Parsons (1909), career decision-making process should be considered three factors. The first factor is a clear self-understanding on your own personality, interests, avoidance, abilities, ambition, potential competencies and limitations. The second factor is the knowledge on the requirements needed to success in a particular career including advantages, disadvantages and opportunities. The last factor is the degree of matching between the first (personal characteristic) and second factors (career requirements). This classic concept are still fitted and be applied to today’s world of work. Basically, career decision-making is a inevitable process that every individual must go through. It is the process that describes and explains the decision made by an individual when choosing a particular vocation (Ghuanpeng, 2011). Moreover, the process also assists in determining various factors that influence an individual’s career decision-making and gives an useful overview or gains better understanding of the way the factors affect his or her career decision (Sharf,

According to his theory, there are four important working assumptions which will be fit the present study. First, individuals can be described and categorized in term of six personality types which are realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising and conventional (RIASEC). The types is considered as a product of one’s experiences such as social and cultural interaction and so on. These experiences influence the preferences of individual in some activities over others. These personality types could be considered as theoretical types that describe an individual and provide a channel by which an individual can be compared and distinguished. As mentioned by Holland, each personality type encompasses a set of attitudes, skills and abilities in coping with problems confronted in the environment. In the meantime, each personality type indicates different career preferences, values and self-concept. An individual may belong to more than one personality types, however, there is always one major personality type that is more dominant than other types. Since members of a vocational group have identical personality, so, they will have similar problem-solving style and tend to handle many situations in similar ways.
The second assumption of Holland’s theory is that individual tends