Work Readiness, Decision-Making Self-Efficacy, and Career Exploration among Engineering Students: A Two-Step Framework

Prior to entering the workforce, engineering students are expected to be highly skilled and contribute to decision-making with confidence in their abilities. Despite this, most students are lacking in these areas. Engineering students typically have a hard time finding work because they lack the necessary skills and are unable to take decisions with confidence. Accordingly, the Washington accord created job-ready features for engineering students that contain core knowledge and design (FKD), project management and finance (PMF), communication (C), modern tool use (MTU), teamwork (TW), engineers’ society and environment (ESE), ethics (E), and lifetime learning (LL). Work readiness (WR) literature will be examined in this study in an effort to promote decision-making self-efficacy (DMSE), which in turn leads to more successful career exploration (CE). Career discovery is then examined as a two-step process, with work readiness influencing decision-making self-efficacy and decision-making self-efficacy influencing career exploration. Malaysian private engineering universities were surveyed using a quantitative way to acquire the data. Results found a strong correlation between work readiness and decision-making self-efficacy, according to scientific evidence. Decision-making self-efficacy was also found to have a significant impact on career exploration. This study is to be useful to curtail unemployment by adopting the required skill set, which will help universities to produce engineers who are able to contribute to decision making with confidence towards exploring their careers. Overall, the results of this study might provide significant information to the related institutions and policymakers on the scarcity of decision-making of talented engineering students in Malaysia.