Hello, everyone. I am Ozaki, a first-year Master’s student. In this article, I would like to introduce the content and my thoughts regarding a paper discussed in our most recent English Literature Seminar.

• Paper Title: Development and Effectiveness Verification of an Online Career Adaptability Program for Undergraduate Students

• Journal: Frontiers in Psychology

• Volume & Pages: 13:857111

• Year of Publication: 2022

• Author: Jihyo Kim

In today’s unpredictable future, various programs have been developed to improve “career adaptability”—the ability to prepare for predictable work situations and cope with unpredictable ones. On the other hand, some point out that many of these have been developed from a performance-oriented perspective, such as employment or grades, rather than from a career support perspective that considers life as a whole.

Focusing on developing the ability to appropriately handle problems and changes faced by South Korean university students, this study developed a program by defining the following three priority areas:

1. Knowledge and Awareness regarding Self and Work Environment: Considering the adaptation factors of the target while focusing on difficulties faced during task execution.

2. Career Actions related to Autonomous Coping: Linking with diagnostic tools to make the program applicable to individually customized career consulting.

3. Environmental Interaction for Career Decisions and Adaptation: Using web-based teaching materials as the primary medium rather than as supplementary tools.

Research Questions

• What is the configuration of a program designed to improve the career adaptability of undergraduate students?

• How did the career adaptability of university students who participated in the program change?

The development followed these procedures:

Study 1: Developing a pilot online career adaptability improvement program and testing its effectiveness.

1. Literature Review and Needs Analysis

2. Design and Development of the Pilot Program

3. Content Validity Verification (Verification via the Delphi method)

4. Implementation of the Pilot Program

Study 2: Performing quantitative analysis to test the effectiveness of the final program. Participants were divided into three groups: an experimental group, a comparison group, and a control group, to investigate changes in career adaptability scores. As a result, a significant positive effect on career adaptability scores was confirmed in the experimental group.

Personal Thoughts I chose this paper because I wanted to learn how to ensure program validity and how to analyze factors related to career adaptability in developing a learning design that promotes career self-regulation for my own research. In particular, the process of incorporating expert opinions in the needs analysis and how to leverage the strengths of an online program were very helpful. In the future, I would like to perform deeper evaluations by combining not only quantitative analysis via questionnaires but also qualitative analysis using learning logs and text analysis of portfolios.