Career Choice And College Students: Parental Influence on Career Choice Traditionalism among College Students in Selected Cities in Ethiopia

Abstract

The study explored the influence of parents on choosing career among college students in selected private colleges situated around Bahirdar City, Ethiopia. Choosing a suitable career is a vital part in every student’s life. Further, it ignites a person’s future life for his/her own job preference and life style. In this context, influence of social members is inevitable; generally the influence of family members and most particularly parents play a major role as a influencer and determiner on choosing a career option. Students in Ethiopia are not exceptional to this phenomenon of selecting right and suitable career. A cross-sectional survey design was adopted and multi stage sampling technique was employed to identify the participants. Totally, 175 participants (Male=99) and (Female =76) responded to Holland Personality Inventory (Holland, 1997) and Career Choice Traditionalism Scale (Hensely, 2003). The collected data were statistically processed using SPSS version 16. Descriptive and inferential statistics was employed to analyse the data. The results revealed that there is a significant influence of parents on career choice among students. Specifically, father’s influence is found to be more significant on career choice decision making among students than their mothers.