Abstract:

Choosing a proper profession is an important issue to a person for being more beneficial to his /her own and the society. There are lots of criteria for a person to consider when selecting a profession. Since there are many criteria, choosing a profession issue becomes a multi criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. In this study, lots of criteria that are considered when choosing a profession are reduced to six main criteria according to a study of Ahmadi et. al. at 1995 and pairwise comparisons of these criteria are assessed by bachelor and graduate students of Bülent Ecevit University (BEÜ), departments of Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences (FEAS). By using questionnaire results, the priorities indicating the importance level of the criteria while choosing a profession is determined by using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) which considers the consistency of responds of the comparisons. According to the results, firstly “Work Guaranty”, than “Profession Benefits” and “Career Opportunities” are determined as the most noticeable criteria for BEÜ FEAS students when choosing a profession. It is observed that, these three criteria have a cumulative priority of 64.35% when choosing a profession. Beside this, differences of the priorities according to participants’ demographic attributes are evaluated using statistical hypothesis tests. According to statistical hypothesis tests, male students pay more attention to “Profession Benefits” when female students do “Work Guaranty”, and “Career Opportunities” become more important with respect to family revenue of students.

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