Evaluation of the Hope of Employability in STEM and Non-STEM Students of Higher Education in Ecuador

Authors

Cansing, Bryan

Triviño, Michelle

Romero, María Elena

Campoverde, Ronald

Abstract

At the end of each semester, higher education students graduate and hope to get a job opportunity because they developed various skills during their education, however this is not a guarantee for obtaining a job. According to research, there are external and internal factors that make it possible to overcome the barriers to finding a job. Because research on the internal components that influence the process of overcoming labor barriers is scarce, this study sought to validate the Employment Hope Scale model developed by Hong et al., (2012). In this, university students from a prestigious university in Ecuador who were about to graduate were taken as a sample. These have different job expectations depending on the type of career, so a distinction was made between STEM and Non-STEM careers. A Confirmatory Factor Analysis was performed to measure the components. Despite the similarity between the self-assessments, significant differences were found in one of the self-esteem items between the students of the STEM and Non-STEM careers.