Aspirations for Careers in State-Owned Enterprises: Evidence From a Low Middle-Income Country

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) play an important role in Vietnam’s economy. It is of interest to policymakers to know to what extent undergraduate college students, who will soon join the labor force, aspire to work for SOEs. Our study is the first to examine the relationships between career aspirations and social support expectations as well as employment self-efficacy, and to conduct regression analyses of the moderation effects of gender, parental background, and family involvement on these relationships. We found that both expected social support and employment self-efficacy are strong predictors of SOE-career aspirations. We also found strong evidence that gender, parental background, and family involvement have moderating effects on the associations of SOE-career aspirations with expected social support and employment self-efficacy.