This is an interesting question,
@Noah Pollock! My short answer is I don't know, but I have some potential leads.
I agree that the literature seems scarce in this area. I haven't seen anything comparing rates across industries. I got the same impression that most of the literature that looks at specific professions is in health care and education, but I did find a conference paper on career regret among IT professionals (
Santa and Giri, 2017) and a paper on career regret among university students (
Biricik, 2019).
Expanding to literature on aspects of occupational regret that does not include rates (as far as I can tell from a quick skim), I found a bit more. This included
Budjanovcanin and Rodrigues, 2017;
Budjanovcanin and Woodrow, 2022;
Canivet et al., 2017;
Hennessey, 2011;
Rodrigues et al., 2021;
Schulze Schleithoff et al., 2022; and
Sullivan et al., 2007. There was also a working paper by Wrzesniewski and colleagues (2007) that was cited by Budjanovcanin and Woodrow (2021), but I'm not aware of this ever being published. Many of these papers express similar thoughts as you did about the state of the literature, such as Hennessey:
Despite the fact that career has been consistently documented as a major life regret for many it is rarely mentioned, or only referred to tangentially, in career development literature.
Some other terms I saw used include occupational regret, non-desired occupation, and career regret.
Baruch and Vardi (2016) wrote a well-cited and tangentially-related paper that seems to have influenced at least a few of the aforementioned scholars.
In the absence of research comparing career regret across industries, it may be more fruitful to use a proxy, like career satisfaction.
It may also be helpful to reach out to some of the above scholars, as they may know if there is research out there that more directly addresses what you're talking about. Some scholars who came up repeatedly were
Ali Budjanovcanin of King's College London,
Chris Woodrow of the University of Reading,
Ricardo Rodrigues of King's College London. Dr. Budjanovcanin is the scholar whose research this topic seems most central to.
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Lee Crowther
Library Specialist
Association of American Medical Colleges
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Original Message:
Sent: 01-05-2023 10:03:30 AM
From: Noah Pollock
Subject: Career Regret Comparison Across Vocations
Hello Community,
The Graduation Questionnaire asks, "35. If you could revisit your career choice, would you choose to attend medical school again?", and we ask a similar question on our Post-Graduation Questionnaire, "If you could revisit your career choice, would you choose to become a physician again?"
Has anyone investigated how career choice regret compares to other industries or vocations? For example, do students who attend medical school or become physicians regret their choices more or less than those who attend law school or become lawyers, engineers, teachers, etc.
I've found some related research looking at teachers, but the literature seems to be scarce. We're hoping there are other professional organizations that ask similar questions.
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Noah Pollock
Director of Curriculum Data Management
Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine
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