Mapping Career Guidance Opportunities for Senior Secondary Students: A Comparative Study Across Three Indian States

Abstract

Career guidances opens doors to informed choices, helping individuals align their strengths with the right professional paths. It empowers students and professionals to explore diverse industries, understand trends and set achievable goals. The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between career guidance opportunities and career decision making among 900 senior secondary students across socio-cultural zones of three states viz. Punjab, Haryana and Uttarakhand. A self-structured career guidance opportunities checklist was used to assess career decision making levels of the career guidance opportunities checklist. The findings indicated that overall higher proportion of the respondents reported a moderate level of career guidance across all the regions of the three states. The highest proportion of respondents from Punjab, irrespective of the genders, had received moderate level of career guidance except for the boys of Majha reporting high career guidance. Similar results were also found across all the regions of Haryana and Uttarakhand except for the girls in Garhwal region receiving high level of career guidance.