Career Choice and the Impact of Social Media

Context: This article examines the effects of social media on adolescents’ career choices. For adolescents in countries with well-established vocational education systems and early selection, significant career- and education-related decisions must be made when moving from lower to upper secondary education. This creates pressure at a stage when adolescents typically have limited direct work experience. In this context, social media may serve as a relevant alternative source of vicarious experiences, complementing traditional forms of input from parents, peers, and the broader social environment. However, the growing impact of social media on career choice has only been scarcely studied to date. Addressing this issue, we focus on adolescents’ social media use in Austria, where the majority of adolescents around the age of 14 or 15 must choose whether to continue their education in a vocational full-time school, a dual apprenticeship program, or a general secondary school leading to a higher education entrance qualification. Approach: We collected a sample of 88 Austrian adolescents and conducted a series of 16 focus group interviews in which we discussed job-related social media postings that were brought up by algorithms of relevant platforms in a preliminary survey. We analyzed the qualitative data obtained in the focus group interviews based on Bandura's social-cognitive theory. The focus was on the emergence of observational learning within the framework of reciprocal determinism, which emphasizes the agency of the adolescents themselves for the possible impacts of social media on career choice. Findings: In line with earlier studies, we found that the majority of adolescents do not actively use social media for their career choices and that they are also aware of the limited validity of social media content. However, adolescents made clear that attempts to influence or even manipulate them into choosing a certain career or educational track are common on social media and that they are aware of this. While most attempts to influence their career decisions are actively avoided, in some cases, an emancipatory effect became visible where adolescents used social media to access vocational role models that were not accessible in their own (physical) social environment. This allowed us to uncover individual cases that had not yet been reported in previous studies, in which not only existing vocational preferences were reinforced, but new vocational preferences emerged as a result of engaging with social media content. Conclusions: Social media is just one factor among many when it comes to career choice. The impact of social media on career choice is co-produced by the agency of adolescents themselves. Since social media and attempts to manipulate behavior are also omnipresent with regard to career choice, media and information literacy turn out to be crucial.