New Article: A Systematic Literature Review of Research on School-to-Work Transitions

We published a new article entitled "Organizing School-to-Work Transition Research from a Sustainable Career Perspective: A Review and Research Agenda" in the journal Work, Aging and Retirement. The article presents the findings of a literature review on the transition from school to work, thereby bringing together research from Education, Psychology, Sociology, and Economics. We used a sustainable career lens to organize the existing literature and share ideas for future research in this area. Among other things, we suggest focusing more prominently on what people can actually do to prepare for and navigate the transition (i.e., study more behavioral predictors and mechanisms). We also encourage researchers to look at disruptive events when researching this transition. Overall, this article will hopefully help many researchers, practitioners, educators, and policymakers to understand what we know and still need to know about helping emerging adults transition into the world of work successfully.

You can read the article HERE. It is freely accessible to anyone. A brief abstract is below.

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ABSTRACT

A successful school-to-work transition is crucial to an individual’s initial entry into the labor market and overall sustainable career development. Scholarly interest in how emerging adults (i.e., late teens to late 20s) can achieve a successful transition to work has grown considerably, stemming from various disciplines, such as educational sciences, psychology, sociology, and economics. These disciplines have all produced valuable knowledge, yet, they mostly exist as separate silos, without clear integration. To create an overview of the literature, we systematically reviewed school-to-work transition literature and used a sustainable career lens to organize it. Based on 365 articles from the past 28 years, our review findings show that there are different conceptual and theoretical approaches to studying school-to-work transitions. We subsequently organize these perspectives into antecedents categorized into the sustainable career perspective’s person, context, and time dimensions. Moreover, we categorize school-to-work transition outcomes as proximal and more distal outcomes related to happiness, health, and productivity indicators. Finally, we reflect on the implications of our review article and suggest ways forward for conceptualizing and theorizing modern school-to-work transitions, along with an agenda for future research.