Job Values in Professional Education: The role of achievement goals

What kind of jobs students prefer after having completed their professional education may have important personal and organisational consequences. It is therefore essential to gain a better understanding of the job values they pursue, as well as of the antecedents of such values. In this longitudinal study, we first showed that the job values of the 152 participating Norwegian student nurses and student teachers could be divided into extrinsic job values, such as high salary and good opportunities for advancement, and intrinsic job values, such as good social relations and interesting work. Moreover, we found that an important aspect of academic motivation, that is, students' achievement goals, predicted their job values. Specifically, students adopting performance‐approach goals were more likely to pursue extrinsic job values and students adopting mastery goals were more likely to pursue intrinsic job values. Ways in which the findings address current controversies in the literature on achievement goals are discussed.