IT Students Career Confidence and Career Identity During COVID-19

2025-03-12

AI Summary

This study investigates the dynamic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on career confidence and professional identity among undergraduate IT students in Australian universities. Drawing on a four-year longitudinal survey (2018–2021), we employed ANOVA and Kruskal–Wallis tests to examine temporal trends. Results indicate stable career confidence across the period, while professional commitment significantly increased in 2021—accompanied by heightened domain-specific expectations and self-perceived developmental agency. Contrary to prevailing assumptions that crises uniformly erode career readiness, this study is the first to identify a counterintuitive resilience pattern—“stable confidence, rising commitment”—among IT undergraduates during systemic disruption. We propose a dynamic model of professional identity development, positing that external shocks can activate endogenous mechanisms of occupational reinforcement. This advances theoretical understanding of vocational socialization in digital-era contexts and provides novel empirical grounding for crisis-responsive career education research.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Multiagent Systems: Multiagent Systems under Uncertainty
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Causality

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Responsible Web: Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications
• Social Networks and Social Media: Analysis of web-mediated communications, communities, and crowds

Abstract

COVID-19 disrupted the professional preparation of university students, with less opportunity to engage in professional practice due to a reduced employment market. Little is known about how this period impacted upon the career confidence and career identity of university students. This research paper explores the career confidence and identity of university students in Information Technology (IT) prior and during the COVID-19 period. Using a survey method and quantitative analysis, ANOVA and Kruskal-Wallis tests with different sensitivity and variance standards were used during analysis to present mean and mean rank of data collected during 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. 1349 IT students from an Australian University reported their career confidence. The results indicate IT students' career confidence maintained during the period. In 2021, the results indicate increased career commitment of IT students showing higher professional expectations to work in IT along with greater self-awareness regarding their professional development needs. Even with increased career confidence as observed in this study, supporting university students to explore their career options and build upon their career identity, and more broadly their employability, remains an important activity for universities to curate in their graduates.

Problem

• Impact of COVID-19 on IT students' career confidence and identity.
• Analysis of career confidence trends among IT students from 2018 to 2021.
• Importance of universities supporting career exploration and employability.

Innovation

• Survey method for data collection
• ANOVA and Kruskal-Wallis tests analysis
• Quantitative analysis of career confidence