Fostering Career Adaptability through Service Learning in Business Education: The Joint Role of Individual Learning Goal Orientation and Perceived Project Characteristics

Career adaptability is a competency that helps graduating students cope effectively during the school-to-work transition and afterward in their working lives. Service-learning projects allow students to apply academic theories in real-world settings and navigate complex, practical problems like those they will face in their careers. At present, little is known about the interactions between student traits and perceptions of service-learning course projects that jointly foster career adaptability. Using three waves of data with 215 graduating business students, the present research assessed how students’ perceptions of a service-learning project (i.e., project quality, project utility value) might moderate the relationship between learning goal orientation and career adaptability. As expected, learning goal orientation, perceived project quality, and perceived utility value each related positively to business students’ career adaptability. Further, perceptions of project quality strengthened the relationship between learning goal orientation and career adaptability, while perceived utility value weakened the relationship. These findings advance scholarly understanding of the role of student perceptions in shaping career adaptability. Practically, these results suggest that, depending on student learning goal orientation, emphasizing different parts of the service-learning experience may differentially impact students’ career adaptability.