EVALUATION OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS' CAREER OPPORTUNITIES USING THE FUZZY MULTI-CRITERIA DECISION-MAKING METHOD

One of the most important and challenging issues of the university student is the selection of the right career path, during which many and often incompatible economic, psychological, and social factors must be taken into account. The selection is a classical Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) problem due to these factors, which are career opportunities, job security, job benefits, and a professional-psychological type and career preferences of a student (e.g., vertical/inter-organizational career, professional tasks). Conventional career planning tools frequently cannot systematically balance this multitude of quantitative and qualitative criteria, and the ambiguity and subjectivity of the vision of a student of his future career opportunities is often ignored. In order to deal with such complexity and the existing uncertainty, this paper suggests a new Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (F-MCDM) framework. The F-MCDM method clearly deals with the ambiguity and lack of precision of the subjective ratings of students on career attributes, which include prestige and job flexibility. The framework will initially determine and balance the applicability of the most important criteria, followed by the application of an appropriate F-MCDM method (e.g., Fuzzy AHP or Fuzzy TOPSIS) to enable a systematic assessment and ranking of a list of possible career opportunities. The results will offer a strong, systematic, and clear instrument to students and university career services to evaluate and rank career options, which will add a methodologically adequate approach to the literature on career readiness and decision-making among higher education graduates.