Career Decision-making Patterns of Canadian Youth and Associated Postsecondary Educational Outcomes - ARCHIVED

This paper examines the career expectations of Canadian youth over time, using a longitudinal database, to assess when youth begin to demonstrate consistency in their career choices. In this research, youth are said to demonstrate consistency in their career choices when their response to the question "What kind of job or occupation would you be interested in having when you are about 30 years old?" matches with their answers from earlier cycles of the survey in terms of occupation type and required level of education.

This paper first examines factors contributing to earlier and later consistency in career expectations, followed by a comparison of educational outcomes based on career consistency patterns. The goal of this analysis is to identify differences in educational outcomes based on the career decision making patterns demonstrated by youth.

This article uses data from the Statistics Canada's Youth in Transition Survey (YITS) collected between the years 2000 and 2010, and focuses on cohort A. The YITS cohort A members were 15 years old in 2000, and were surveyed every 2 years until the age of 25.