Career Planning Strategies and Skills of Ho Polytechnic Students, Ghana

Abstract

This study seeks to examine how important career planning is to students, to determine sources of information use in making future career decisions, determine career planning activities being employed by students and to determine the factors students consider the most in choosing a career. A descriptive, cross-sectional survey was conducted among 350 randomly selected students of Ho Polytechnic. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were computed during the analysis of the data using both SPSS and Microsoft Excel. Results show that 89% of the respondents indicated that career planning is very important to them whiles the rest 11% of them also indicated that career planning is quite important to them. Also, majority of the respondents indicated that the “Media”, “Parent/guardian”, “Mentor”, “Relatives and peers”, and “Lecturers” were the sources of information for their career planning process. Furthermore, it was found that “Undertaking strategic industrial attachment”, “Talking to people in the job”, and “Undertaking industry career research” were the main career planning activities adopted by most students. Finally, it was revealed that respondents were unanimous on “Pay and working conditions”, “Good working environment”, and “Personal skills and interest” as a factors they consider the most in choosing a career with about 92%, 59%, and 79% agreement respectively. Therefore, since career planning is of much importance to students, management should endeavor to develop a curriculum on career planning in all tertiary institution in the country. It is also recommended that the media, parents, mentors, relatives and peers should make available as much information to their wards to help in one’s career plan. Furthermore, management should thus increase the duration of industrial attachment since it provides students with career planning activities.