EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND CAREER DECISIONS OF YOUNTH PEOPLE

ABSTRACT

Career decisions have always been some of the most important decisions to undertake, and, in chronological order, the first to intervene at the age of 18, when young people have to choose a faculty, a direction, in which their professional life will be in the years to come, or maybe even in all the years of activity.
The study was attended by 112 high school students, all of them in the 12th grade, from high schools in the South-West Oltenia Region (Romania), who attended a summer school during their vacation in June 2018, so all of them are in front of a common situation related to the career decision.
In this study, we proposed to investigate the level of emotional intelligence (using the Friedmann Emotional Maturity Scale), the choice of occupational interests (investigated with Holland’s hexagonal model through the CEI Intelligence Questionnaire from the CAS-Cognitrom Psychological Testing Platform) , results reported on data from a Demographic Inventory, comprised of a list of participants’ personal data, which included the following information: ID (code given to the participant for confidentiality), age, gender, environment (urban / rural) and the faculty and career option (job or domain) or the lack of them expressed by the participants.
The recorded data were processed using the SPSS program and the results indicated that students had a high level of emotional intelligence, correlated with the fact that the areas of vocational interest to which they expressed the choice coincided with the decisions that the participants are proposing to take in the next year.

Keywords: career decisions, emotional intelligence, occupational interests, young people career