Effects of self-sufficiency and uncertainty perceptions on occupational preferences

Choosing a profession is an important decision that affects the lives of individuals in every way. Many factors such as talents, interests, professional values, socio-demographic features, gender, psychological needs, family relations, personality and physical qualities, features of the jobs taken into consideration, role-models, career opportunities, luck and coincidental situations etc. play a part while making this decision. In addition, self-sufficiency and uncertainty perceptions of individuals are also very important in this process. In order to make their decisions in the right way, individuals need to have a high level of self-sufficiency perception and a low level of uncertainty perception. The aim of this research is to demonstrate the extent to which perceptions of self-sufficiency and uncertainty are influential in determining the professional areas of individuals. For this purpose, a survey was applied to 263 Anadolu University Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Department of Business Administration senior students by using face to face interactions and e-mail. Descriptive statistics of the study and inter-variable relations were analyzed with SPSS 20.00 program; confirmatory factor analyzes of the scales were performed with the AMOS 22.00 program. As a result of this study, it is observed that the perception level of self-sufficiency and uncertainty of senior students was high; but there is no connection between self-sufficiency and uncertainty perceptions and occupational preferences.