Part-Time Working Students and Their Career Development : How Business Students' Perceptions of their Current Part-Time Employer Influences their Future Career Decisions

Sammanfattning: The globalized world of the early 21st century has had great impact on the labour market. Employees of today are faced with many more options then before, increasing staff turnover rates to very high levels. This raises a lot of interesting aspects in how to create affective, mutual and long-lasting employer-employee relationships in the way the world works today. We have identified part-time working students as a key group to investigate since they possess skills and qualifications that is important to retain within an organisation. More particularly, the purpose of this study is to look at part-time working business student and their relationship towards their current employer, their perceptions, and based on that, how likely it is that they will stay within that organisation after graduation. This has led us to our research question:How part-time working business students’ perception of their current employer influences their future career decisions?In the research field of Employee Retention, there is a lack of research on part-time workers, and even more lacking on part-time working students. A theoretical foundation has been created based on different aspects of this subject. Motivational theories, dividing motivation to either Intrinsic or Extrinsic to cover what motivates students in different settings is considered. Branching from motivational theories, the Expectancy theory is used to analyse the reasoning between potential outcomes, in this case job alternatives. As decisions regarding job alternatives shapes the future careers of young workers, research on career decisions with a focus on students, point out specific implications regarding the target group. Finally, to complement our foundation with research regarding the students’ relationship with their current employers, research on Employee Retention adds different predictors of staff turnover. Those predictors are used in order to understand why students say or leave an organisation.In order to answer our research question and to gain deep understanding, we have conducted qualitative interviews with business student at Umeå University. The interviewed students all have different part-time jobs, as to cover as many different organisations as possible. The study shows that part-time working students are influenced in their career decisions by their perception of their current employers and experiences from the job. Regardless of positive or negative experience, intrinsic aspects are desired from future careers, as well as development opportunities. The extent to which the organisation shows an interest in the students’ future development also influences the students’ attitude towards the organisation. However, regarding staying in the current organisations after graduation, the students are faced with issues beyond their control, like geographical complications.