Resumen

CRUZ BARBA, Evangelina  y  SILVA GUTIERREZ, Blanca Noemí. Motivation and personality in career choice: Tourism and International Business. Acta de investigación psicol [online]. 2018, vol.8, n.2, pp.32-41. ISSN 2007-4719.  https://doi.org/10.22201/fpsi.20074719e.2018.2.03.

Career choice involves factors such as personality, family and social environment. In addition to these factors, there are economic and institutional issues affecting the professional demand of public universities. They are important personal characteristics in the students, especially in the context of the Mexican public universities, to achieve greater vocational certainty. In this article we analyze some personality traits, and the way in which the students choose the profession in International Business and Tourism at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico. The literature on motivations in order to choice a career has two different branches. On one hand, there are papers focus on the use of econometric models from an economic perspective supported in Becker´s human capital theory. On the other hand, there are works using factor analysis to reveal characteristics or particularities of certain professional groups. The bulk of these papers are based on Holland’s theory using the Self-Directed Search (SDS) instrument. This paper is based on this theory. This is a quantitative cross-sectional study. Using factor analysis and statistical independence Chi square tests, we analyzed the results of a sample of students in the 2017 period. We intend to identify the factors influencing their choice and personality traits. Our empirical evidence identifies the vocational information factors, external influences, skills, and attitudes that characterize students in both professions. The results provide characteristics of the type of entrepreneurial personality according to Holland’s theory. The personality differences between these two professions are two: First, the “willingness to service”, which is emphasized in Tourism profession rather than International Business profession. Second, the “economic retribution” as a enhancing factor for the career choice, which has a greater weight for the Business profession than Tourism profession. In addition, our work demonstrates the forces generating a type of personality with vocational certainty in a public university.

Palabras llave : Career choice; Service vocation; Economic retribution; Tourism career; Personality traits.

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