The moderating effect of student club membership on the relationship between career intention in the tourism sector and post-graduate employability anxiety

Abstract

The majority of the studies on students who study tourism reveal that they do not plan to build their careers in the tourism industry. It is important for both educators and the tourism industry to determine the career intentions of tourism students and the factors which affect them. There are many studies on tourism students' attitudes towards the tourism industry. The main purpose of this particular study is how extracurricular student club membership status of tourism students affect their career intentions and post-graduation employability anxiety. It analyzes student club membership status as a moderating variable in building relationships between the career intentions and post-graduation employability anxiety. Data were collected from 512 respondents via survey. The research model is tested with structural equation model (SEM) and to test the moderating role of student club membership status in the relationship in question, PROCESS macro for SPSS is favoured. The study presents both theoretical insights and practical implications.

Does Employability Anxiety Trigger Psychological Distress and Academic Major Dissatisfaction? A Study on Tour Guiding Students

“…Sample items included "I am comfortable with my decision". Nine items were also adapted from Unguren and Huseyinli (2020) to measure employability anxiety. The construct was measured on a 5-point Likert-type scale, anchored from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5).…”

“…Anxiety refers to the status of discomfort that an individual may feel in his or her personal life (Vidon & Rickly, 2018). While individuals might be anxious from time to time over various stages of their life, employability anxiety after graduation is seen as one of the important problems especially for university students (Unguren & Huseyinli, 2020). Therefore, it is important to investigate the causes of anxiety given its potential role in affecting students' career choice and other related decisions (Daniels et.…”

“…Therefore, it is possible that tourism students' positive attitudes towards their current majors can be impaired due to the uncertainty about their vocational future. In a recent study, Unguren and Huseyinli (2020) collected data just before the outbreak of the pandemic and concluded that students who perceive the structural characteristics of the tourism sector would negatively experience more work anxiety after graduation. One may assume that this negativity is even more salient now with the tourism employment supply experiencing a sharp decline due to the pandemic.…”

“…For instance, in their study on university students from different departments, Tayfun and Korkmaz (2016) noted that there was a positive and significant relationship between students' employment anxiety and stress. In tourism research, although there are limited insights into employability anxiety (Unguren & Huseyinli, 2020), the relationship between employability anxiety and psychological distress among tourism students remains unexplored. The Covid-19 pandemic has introduced a new reality whereby several jobs such as tour guiding are under threat (Bajrami et al, 2021;Kaushal & Srivastava, 2021).…”

“…Specifically, there is an obvious dearth of research which investigates tourism students' employability anxiety and how this can influence their well-being and attitudes toward their current academic majors. Employability anxiety has received some attention in different disciplines (Tomlinson, 2008;Pisarik et al, 2017) and, to a lesser extent, in tourism and hospitality scholarship (Unguren & Huseyinli, 2020). In the case of tourism students in general and tour guiding students in particular, the relationships between employability anxiety, psychological distress, and academic major satisfaction remain unclear.…”