An Exploratory Study of Career Anchors in Business Higher Education

Abstract

In this paper we aim to explore the topic of Schein’s career anchors in a particular localcontext (business higher education in Romania). In order to so, we studied the literature on careeranchors and applied the test for 86 students of Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Facultyof International Business and Economics, 1st year of study. As expected, we observed a higher negative correlation between general managerial andlifestyle anchors and a series of other general relationships. More than a half of the respondentsare autonomy-anchored and more than a third seem to have the entrepreneurial creativity anchor. We are cautious with respect to the results, since people without work experience might find aseries of statements very interesting, but value them incorrectly based on a series of assumptionsthey make. For our small sample we could not validate the hypothesis that women are morelifestyle oriented than men.

Keywords

• career anchors
• business higher education
• students
• entrepreneurship