In countries with a well-established vocational education and training system, adolescents have to make significant educational choices when transitioning from lower secondary level to upper secondary level. The choice has to be made, for example, between a dual appren-ticeship, school-based iVET, or general upper education. Many factors play a role in this pro-cess, including parents, socio-economic background, gender, peer group, teachers, career advisors and others. Vocational orientation of young people is a multifactorial phenomenon. Many of these factors are considered to be very well researched already. However, there is a surprising scarcity of research on the effects of social media, which are omnipresent in youth culture.

In the meantime, the social media effects on vocational orientation have been researched more widely (e.g. Großegger et al. 2022, Ohlemann et al. 2019). However, there is still a lack of findings on how adolescents search for vocational information on social media (Geh-rau 2020). It is also unclear how “young people deal with information from social media such as Instagram” (Jahncke et al. 2020) when they come across job-related information there.

This leads us to two research questions:

1. How do young people deal with job-related information on social media?
2. What learning effects does this have on the career guidance process?

We address these research questions by focusing on the educational decisions of adoles-cents in Austria on the doorstep to upper secondary education.

The theoretical framework of our study is grounded in social cognitive theory (Bandura 2008). A key premise of this approach is reciprocal determinism, which posits that media effects on adolescents' career choice behaviors occur within a dynamic, reciprocal interac-tion with other influencing factors, wherein the adolescents themselves are significant de-terminants. Based on this agentive perspective, we analyze the extent to which adolescents seeking career guidance co-create or mitigate the potential effects of social media. In doing so, they actively modify their (media) environment, which constitutes yet another important determinant of social media impact.

We conducted a total of 16 focus group interviews (Schulz et al. 2012) with 89 adolescents from the 8th grade of Austrian Intermediate Secondary School and Academic Grammar School at the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024. In this setting, we discussed with the students a battery of 8 job-related postings that are shown on social media by the algorithm when using hashtags such as “job”, “profession” and “career choice”. The interview re-sponses were transcribed and then analyzed with qualitative content analysis (Rädiker & Kuckartz, 2020) using the MAXQDA software. The coding followed a deductive category sys-tem based on social-cognitive theory and resulted in a total of almost 3,000 codes.

The agentive approach of social cognitive theory has made clear that adolescence actively suppress the vast majority of attempts to influence them on social media. Advertising for vocational training places, influencer content for certain types of education and training op-portunities are swiped away on an ad hoc basis. The actual effects on career orientation, which occur relatively rarely, show major differences, which are particularly related to how the learning processes take place in detail. These differences have led us to distinguish 3 types of youth: the leisure type, the opportunity type and the focus type. Going beyond pre-vious research findings, we can differentiate the effects of social media more precisely via these three types. We were also able to show that social media not only reinforce existing vocational preferences, but can also trigger new career choices under certain conditions.

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