School to Work: The Interplay of Career Guidance, Conscientiousness, and Autonomous Motivation

The motivation literature has typically focused on motivation at the workplace. Thus, this conceptual paper attempts to shift the theoretical emphasis from motivation during work to the motivation to work. Given this, I propose a framework to examine how career guidance services, offered to graduating seniors, predicts their motivation to work after graduating, and subsequently generates positive work outcomes. This proposed framework invites questions about the adequacy of the existing motivational theory to address motivation at the school-to-work transition stage.