Organizing School-to-Work Transition Research from a Sustainable Career Perspective: A Review and Research Agenda

A successful school-to-work transition is crucial to an individual’s initial entry into the labor market and overall sustainable career development. Scholarly interest in how emerging adults (i.e., late teens to late 20s) can achieve a successful transition to work has grown considerably, stemming from various disciplines, such as educational sciences, psychology, sociology, and economics. These disciplines have all produced valuable knowledge, yet, they mostly exist as separate silos, without clear integration. To create an overview of the literature, we systematically reviewed school-to-work transition literature and used a sustainable career lens to organize it. Based on 365 articles from the past 28 years, our review findings show that there are different conceptual and theoretical approaches to studying school-to-work transitions. We subsequently organize these perspectives into antecedents categorized into the sustainable career perspective’s person, context, and time dimensions. Moreover, we categorize school-to-work transition outcomes as proximal and more distal outcomes related to happiness, health, and productivity indicators. Finally, we reflect on the implications of our review article and suggest ways forward for conceptualizing and theorizing modern school-to-work transitions, along with an agenda for future research.