A qualitative case study on the career development patterns of the millennial generation during college

Objectives As higher education enrollment rates increase, college students' career development is becoming more difficult. A study was conducted to find out how college students' career development is carried out in their lives and the degree of career development activities and supporting people and relationships. Methods Previous studies have focused on the development and effectiveness of career-related curriculum or extracurricular programs, and one study found that college students were active in participating in school-led extracurricular programs. In this study, college students' self-directed experiences were investigated. Qualitative research methods is useful for understanding personal perception and experiences. Using a purposive sampling method, we studied students attending University A in Seoul in 2013 with a population of 30,000. Charmaz's qualitative research analysis method was used. Results A lifestyle convergence experiment that naturally integrates one's current life with the life after work, participating in projects deemed meaningful to build up the ‘specs’ expected to be needed for a future job in the ‘market’, and is busy creating a resume that increases the value. They were divided into the project-collection type, which does not have a job, and the test preparation immersion type, where students choose a career path where paper-based exams are commonly used, such as public service or graduate school, and spend their college life as if they were taking the exam. Conclusions Type I participated in voluntarily chosen activities and also formed relationships in involuntary groups to which they naturally belonged. Type II prioritized interpersonal relationships necessary to achieve one's goals and focused on voluntarily chosen relationships. Type III is a meeting necessary for the department or class, and relationships are minimized. Knowledge has the characteristic of being implicitly embodied not only in personal encounters but also in the reality of participation, and it can be understood as having the characteristic that the more contextual separation is chosen, the more narrow human relationships become.