PREFERENCES OF JOB ATTRIBUTES AND ITS DETERMINANTS: A CONJOINT ANALYSIS

Abstract

This study is aimed to estimate the relative importance of attributes in job choices and identify the key job characteristics that influence the job preferences of management undergraduates in a selected national university in Sri Lanka. A total of 100 undergraduates from third and fourth years who are following a Business Management degree in the university were selected in 2020 as the sample for the study. The manufacturing sector, banking sector, academic sector and auditing sector were taken as the major types of job choices and its frequency results show that 40% and 22 % of the students prefer to select the manufacturing and auditing sectors respectively whereas 19 % of them chose banking and academic sectors. The results of chi-square test suggest that personal factors and job attributes are significantly associated with the job choices. The conjoint analysis followed by part-worth utility was employed to investigate the relative importance of various attributes of job choices and its results have revealed that the type of contract, career path and salary have more importance than the other two attributes in terms of job choices. The findings of the study are important for academics in revising their curriculums towards job oriented ness and suggest the managers for designing the jobs to attract and retain the best talented workers in their organizations in the future.