Factors affecting the career choice of students in tourism: Evidence from Danang city, Vietnam

Article history: Received: March 3, 2020 Received in revised format: March 25 2020 Accepted: May 2, 2020 Available online: May 3, 2020 The purpose of this research was to determine the factors affecting the career choice of students in Tourism in Danang City, Vietnam. The survey adopted some questionnaire from the existing literature, distributed among 350 randomly chosen participants and managed to collect 300 properly filled ones. Cronbach’s Alphas were well above the desirable level and confirmed the overall survey. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was implemented to reduce the important factors into six groups and multiple regression analysis (MRA) was executed in order to measure the effects of each group on the career choice. The survey results show that the career choice of students in Tourism was due to career opportunities, belief in self-capacity, culture, intellect and the imposition of others. © 2020 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada


Introduction
Danang is a tourist city of Vietnam. The city is a popular tourist destination and has many unique tourist activities. The quality of tourism's staff is the main reason for attracting many people. According to a forecast accomplished in 2020, Da Nang will welcome 8.5 million visitors, including 2.5 million international visitors, 6 million domestic visitors and the demand for direct tourism labor will reach 35,289. In particular, the accommodation industry in 2020 will increase to 26,000 rooms, 62,000 rooms are forecasted in 2030 and will require 65,000 to 70,000 employees for the trained hotel industry. This shows that the demand for training at educational institutions is extremely urgent. There were many researches on the career choice of students as well as factors affecting the career choice of students. Some researches on the career choice of students and factors affecting the career choice of students were performed by Chapman (1981), Paolillo and Estes (1982), Oanh (1996), Auyeung and Sands (1997), Borchert (2002), Qui and Thi (2009). However, there had not been any research on factors affecting the career choice of students in Tourism in Danang City, Vietnam. Therefore, this study will focus on the career choice of students in Tourism as well as factors affecting them in Danang City, Vietnam.

The career choice of students
According to Borchert (2002) there are three main elements affecting the choice of career including environment, opportunity and personal characteristics, and personal characteristics maintains the highest importance for choosing the job of students of high school. Tang et al. (2008) used the model of career society development theory (Felton et al., 1994) surveying factors affecting the work choice trend of the students of high school. This research pointed out that the studied knowledge, self-assessment ability for career, benefits and expected results in career development process affect the choice of the job of students of high school. Chapman (1981) argued that university factors such as tuition fees, geographic location, cost support policies or dormitory environment will influence the student's choice of school. In Vietnam, Oanh (1996) showed that the effectiveness of the choice of the work of students depends on 3 elements mainly based on "triangle of career guidance" including awareness of career world, awareness of the demanding work of the society and advising work. Qui and Thi (2009), through the analysis of 227 answer sheets of high school students in five high schools in Quang Ngai province, showed four factors including future employment opportunities, characteristics of the university, the student personally that influence the decision to choose a university.

Factors affecting the career choice of students
(1) Belief in self-capacity: According to Bandura (1997) "Believe in self-capacity is an identification of individual about psycho-physical characteristics of themselves meet the requirements of a certain job and ensure that the work achieves a result". According to this theory, there are four causes of believing in self-capacity: experience of themselves; social learning; the incentive of society and emotional states. From this, the author hypothesized the following: Hypothesis 1 (H1): There is a positive effect of belief in self-capacity on the career choice of students in Tourism.
(2) Career opportunities: These are the factors favorable for the career development of students when working, such as job opportunities, increasing incomes, stable jobs, dynamic and professional working environment (Felton et al., 1994;Tan & Laswad, 2006). However, Jackling and Calero (2006) do not agree with this view.
Hypothesis 2 (H2): There is a positive effect of career opportunities on the career choice of students in Tourism.
(3) Culture: Cultural values according to Hofstede (1980) include: The gap of power, individualism, the avoidance of unknown issues, masculinity, long-term orientation, passion for restraint. Some people believe that Vietnamese culture has a middle distance of power, collectivism, avoiding unclear issues and long-term orientation.
Hypothesis 3 (H3): There is a positive effect of culture on the career choice of students in Tourism.
(4) Intellect: Myburgh (2005) studied the factors that influence the choice of becoming an accountant for freshmen at Pretoria University, the aptitude as well as the advice and guidance of parents. Hobbies are regular or habitual particles to bring people joy and excitement. Interest is an important determinant for students to choose an accounting profession (Jackling & Calero, 2000).
Hypothesis 4 (H4): There is a positive effect of intellect on the career choice of students in Tourism.
(5) The imposition of others: Advice of family members, relatives, teachers and friends impact on intents of students choice of accountancy (Tan & Laswad, 2006). Similarly, Auyeung and Sands (1997) indicated that parents, teachers, alumni, friends will affect the choice of career of students of Asia. Because of the effect of cultural tradition, their decisions focus on toward family.
Hypothesis 5 (H5): There is a negative effect of the imposition of others on the career choice of students in Tourism.

Proposal of research model
Based on the research of previous authors and the theoretical background presented, combined with the study of characteristics of tourism students, the author built the proposed research model as follows:

Culture (CUL)
The career choice of students in Tourism (CHO)

Intellect (INT)
Belief in self-capacity (BEL) Career opportunities (OPP) The imposition of others (IMP)

Data Collection and Research Methodology
The data were collected from the survey at 3 universities during the fourth quarter of 2019 in Danang City, Vietnam. There were 350 students of the tourism department (in the total of 1,000 students at Universities in Danang City) who participated in this survey. After eliminating the invalid votes, 300 remaining votes were reliable for analysis. To achieve the goals of this research, we have used a combination of the qualitative and quantitative methods. Qualitative research was applied by interviewing the experts. Based on the collecting opinions from experts (including the Lectures in tourism, Tourism Associations, Danang Tourism Department) about the factors affecting the career choice of students in tourism, we have developed, adjusted and rearranged the questionnaire to set a formal scale to do the survey at Universities in Danang City, Vietnam. Quantitative method was used by these steps: designing the study, collecting data, quantitative analysis was also used based on software version 20.0 SPSS. This software has been used to synthesize and present basic data about the frequency of variables and statistical description of factors and their impacts on the career choice of students in tourism. In this study, first author used Cronbach Alpha Test techniques to test the factors of the scale then we have used technical analysis exploratory factor (EFA) to reduce the observed variables, change variable names and models shortened; finally we ran regression models through regression analysis techniques to assess the final conclusions of the factors that affect the career choice of students in tourism at Universities of Danang City.

Result and Discussion
In this survey, the author has proposed a model of 20 independent observers (variables) gathered in 5 groups of factors and 4 observers for the dependent variable. To test the reliability of the scale model of the original author used the Cronbach's Alpha testing. Results of the testing were eliminated from model 6 observations and the results are in Table 1.  .000 As can be seen in the test result of the rating scale measuring the career choice of students in Tourism, the Cronbach's Alpha = 0.887 (>0.6), the gross correlation coefficients are approximately or greater than 0.5 (much more than the acceptable level of 0.3); hence, the reliability of this rating scale is acceptable. After the Cronbach's Alpha test, we used the result acquired from the summary of 300 eligible answers and input variables into EFA to take out factors. The result of the selection of Varimax rotation and shortened down to the variable load factor less than 0.55 after the first time running, the results showed: KMO=0.892 with Sig=0.000 significance level and extracting 6 factors with the gross variance ex-tracted=63.601% (Table 2 and Table 3).  As can be seen in Table 4, there are 6 factors with the gross variance extracted equal to 63.601%, which means these 6 factors can explain for 63.601% the career choice of students in tourism in Danang City. Therefore, we have developed the model of Multiple Regression as follows, Y= β0 + Β1BEL + β2OPP + β3INT + β4CUL -β5IMP Therein: + Dependent variable: The career choice of students in Tourism (Y). + Independent variable: Belief in self-capacity (BEL), Career opportunities (OPP), Culture (CUL), Intellect (INT), The imposition of others (IMP).
After successfully developing the model of factors that affect the career choice of students in Tourism in Danang City, we processed to assess this model by Multiple Regression Analysis (MRA) model to test its appropriateness and to examine the extent to which these factors influence the effectiveness of internal control systems. The result of MRA analysis generated by SPSS with "Enter" method is given in Table 5 as follows:

Conclusion
This is an empirical study on the pattern of factors affecting the career choice of students in Tourism at Universities at Danang, Vietnam. Based on the results of research, we have come up with the key factors that affect the career choice of students in tourism including belief in self-capacity, career opportunities, culture, intellect and the imposition of others. Detection is vital for the orientation of students having a right vision in the career. Moreover, there is a need for improving the strategy of admissions, renew of proper training programs for school to satisfy the need for learners and society in the coming time.

Some policy implications
Firstly, "Culture" has the most effect (coefficient = 0.339) on the career choice of students in Tourism. It is generally believed that learning must go to practicing, so schools have to focus on linking with enterprises to students experience the fact to understand working environment, feature and culture of tourism industry staff. Culture is a vital element which make the favorable and long-term work, to build an amazing culture, so self-learners must build a relationship based on friendly atmosphere, help people and work enthusiastically.
Secondly, "Intellect" (coefficient = 0.301). When decision chooses to become a tourism industry staff, students have to consider the suitable capacity of themselves for tourism industry staff. Hence, the career choice must be according to the ability to have motivation in studying a beneficial result. Besides, students need to resolve learning, exercise skills such communication, negotiation, leadership and so on.
Third, "Career opportunity" (coefficient = 0.263). Universities need to organize career orientation for junior high school students more effectively so that they could understand the nature and characteristics of accounting profession to help them make the right decision when they want to pursue a career. Organize regular extracurricular sessions, bringing students to practice experience at companies. In addition, teachers need to always update the latest travel information to disseminate to students, helping students capture information to learn and work correctly, in accordance with the standards.