Making a good career choice: A decision-analytical intervention to enhance high school students’ proactive decision-making and career choice self-efficacy

At the end of high school, teenagers have to deal with their first life-changing decisions when deciding what to do after having graduated from school. For these decisions, adolescents need to be able to make good decisions. However, most schools have not implemented decision trainings into their curricula yet. A new intervention called "KLUGentscheiden!" was developed to train complex decision-making in high school students to close this gap. The intervention targets three key components of good decision making: envisioning one's objectives, identifying relevant alternatives, and comparing the identified alternatives by a weighted evaluation.We assumed that successfully training those decision-analytical steps should enhance self-perceived proactive decision-making skills. In addition, the training should also enhance self-assessed career choice self-efficacy. The intervention was evaluated in a pseudorandomized control study including 193 high school students. Compared to a control group, the intervention group significantly increased proactive decision-making skills and career-choice self-efficacy. Although different long-term evaluations are still pending, the KLUGentscheiden! intervention could provide an important tool to train complex decision-making in high-school students. In its essentials, it could also be applied to other career choices of young individuals, such as choosing majors, a final thesis, a job, or a field of work.