Adolescents’ Career Adaptability and Their Perceived Collective Contributions to Career Efficacy Over Time: A Network Analysis

Although career adaptability is well-established as pivot to adolescent career development, the network interconnections among its dimensions remain unexamined. Moreover, while collective contributions to career efficacy (CCCE) from different significant others have been viewed as key contributors to adolescent career adaptability, such associations have been rarely approached from a network perspective, leaving potential differential specificity in such links under-detected. To narrow these gaps, this study employed network analysis to investigate the interconnections among career adaptability dimensions and their associations with CCCE from different sources over time. Three-annual-wave longitudinal data were collected from 1,952 Chinese adolescents (15.54 ± 0.54; 43.9% males) across their senior high school years. Results indicated that curiosity and confidence consistently served core functions in the career adaptability network over time. CCCE from parents and teachers exhibited stronger connections with career confidence than CCCE from peers, while peers’ CCCE was closely related to career curiosity. The findings highlight the importance of cultivating adolescents’ career curiosity and confidence to improve career adaptability. The differential specificity in the links between different sources of CCCE and career adaptability dimensions offers insights for designing interventions in family and school settings that are aimed at promoting adolescents’ career adaptability.