The Influence of Perceived College Support and Career Adaptability on Tertiary Students’ Subsequent Job Satisfaction

The purpose of this study aims to examine the effects of perceived college support and career adaptability on the subsequent job satisfaction of tertiary students after they transition from college to work. A total of 8,748 respondents from the 2017 Graduates Occupational Mobility Survey (2016GOMS) provided usable data. An exploratory factor analysis was performed to extract the desirable common factor model of each latent variable: perceived college support, career adaptability, and job satisfaction, and then structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed by testing the path coefficients between latent variables of the hypothesized model. The findings suggested that the model fitted the data well; that perceived college support had a positive influence on career adaptability and job satisfaction; that career adaptability had a positive influence on job satisfaction; and that women showed higher effects of perceived college effect on career adaptability and job satisfaction than men. The results imply that female students are more influenced by college support and make more efforts to enter the contemporary Korean labor market but less satisfied with their jobs than male students.