Effects of a future work self writing intervention on ruminative career exploration and career decision-making...

Career decision-making difficulties are widespread among final-year university students entering an uncertain labor market. A salient future work self is commonly assumed to relieve them by motivating career exploration, yet associations between exploration and indecision remain inconsistent across studies. Drawing on identity development theory, we distinguish reflective from ruminative career exploration, defined as repetitive self-questioning that generates distress rather than usable information, and test whether a future work self writing intervention works by decreasing rumination rather than by increasing exploration.

In a three-arm parallel-group randomized controlled trial, 486 final-year students from 4 universities in China were allocated 1:1:1 to future work self writing, an active control (general future planning writing) or a waitlist control. The intervention comprised four weekly structured writing sessions of approximately 20 minutes, and outcomes were assessed at baseline, post-intervention, and one- and three-month follow-up. Primary outcomes were ruminative career exploration and the lack of readiness dimension of career decision-making difficulties; reflective exploration, the other two difficulty dimensions and future work self salience were secondary, and employment indicators exploratory. Intention-to-treat analyses used latent growth curve modeling and longitudinal mediation.

Relative to both control conditions, future work self writing reduced ruminative career exploration (d = 0.41, 95% CI [0.22, 0.61] vs. waitlist) and lack of readiness (d = 0.43, 95% CI [0.25, 0.62] vs. waitlist), estimated as slope contrasts across the four-wave observation period rather than as a test of the between-group difference at three months specifically. Effects on reflective career exploration were non-significant and statistically equivalent to zero within a margin of d = 0.30. Change in ruminative career exploration accounted for approximately 35% of the effect on lack of readiness, whereas change in reflective exploration did not; these estimates are associational rather than definitive evidence of causal mediation, and no employment indicator remained significant after correction.

The benefit of clarifying one's future work self appears to lie less in stimulating additional exploration than in interrupting unproductive career rumination. Career guidance may therefore be more effective when it addresses how students explore rather than how much.