Chinese American and Chinese immigrant youths concerning their career decision-making process

Chinese American and Chinese immigrant youths concerning their career decision-making process

A right career decision always leads to self-satisfaction. In many occasions, personal interests conflict with the cultural heritage. China is a country with a collectivist cultural setting. As such, several cultural factors affect the career choices of the Chinese American and Chinese immigrant youths concerning their career decision-making process. One of these factors is the high intergenerational family conflict (Chen & Liew 2015). This factor leads to career indecision. Indecision in a career means that one is not able to make a firm decision about the job he/she wishes to peruse. Such indecisions are attributed to the inadequate separation of youths from their parents. The status of this decisiveness assesses an individual’s career maturity. Another factor is the high relational interdependent self-construal. This factor influences career certainty. Certainty in a career means the degree to which individuals are confident of having decided to pursue a career.

One significant difference in the Asian and Western values concerning choosing a career is the collective versus the individualism (Ramesh & Gelfand 2010). In the Asian, one has to choose a job that conforms to the cultural settings of the community. On the contrary, in the western, much concern is in personal problems rather than career problems when considering career decisions.  In the Asian community, the youths stay for long with their parents because of the collectivism, but in the western, the teenagers gain freedom early enough and at the age of seventeen, can make decisions on their own. The Asian hold the view that career opportunities are to be provided by the government and the community. At the same time, in the western states, an individual’s aggressiveness determines his/her success in the career market.

References

Chen, L. S., & Liew, S. A. (2015, December). Factors Influencing Career Decision-Making Difficulties among Graduating Students from Malaysian Private Higher Educational Institutions. In Proceedings of 8th Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference. Proceedings of 8th Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference (February).

Ramesh, A., & Gelfand, M. J. (2010). Will they stay or will they go? The role of job embeddedness in predicting turnover in individualistic and collectivistic cultures. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(5), 807.