Uncertain occupational aspirations in adolescence: Influencing factors and coping strategies

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Kathrin Leuze
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 558979359

In the German education system, which is characterized by a high degree of occupational specificity, the decision for an apprenticeship or a field of study is central to the further course of employment. Nevertheless, around a third of young people in Germany have only vague or no realistic occupational aspirations at the end of their schooling, with major differences between school types. These occupationally undecided young people have hardly been studied in Germany to date, despite the enormous relevance of occupational decisions for the further employment trajectory. The proposed project therefore examines the question of who these undecided young people are and how they manage the upcoming transition to vocational training or higher education in the face of this indecision. As a theoretical contribution of the project, the conceptual considerations of Ginzberg and Heckhausen are applied to the phenomenon of occupationally undecided young people in order to identify psychological, performance- and value-related, social and contextual factors that cause the lack of realistic occupational aspirations at the end of school and explain how occupationally undecided young people manage the upcoming transition to vocational training or higher education. The empirical analyses are based on Starting Cohorts 3 and 4 of the National Educational Panel Study. After recoding missing values on career aspirations in both data sets, different types of undecided young people are first identified exploratively using longitudinal cluster analyses and cluster membership is modeled by means of multinomial logistic regressions. Subsequently, possible coping strategies for missing or vague career aspirations are analyzed by examining the further life courses of the different types of young people with undecided careers. For both analyses, students at the transition to vocational training are compared with those at the transition to higher education in order to take into account the different institutional structuring of these two transitions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Australia
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Joanna Sikora