Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) is a conceptual model used to understand career choices. The theory is based on Bandura’s (1986) social cognitive theory and suggests that career choices are the result of interactions between personal, behavioral, and contextual factors (Lent et al., 1994). 

In this study, we are primarily interested in learning experiences and their eventual influence on career goals, career choices, and performance domains and attainments. In SCCT, learning experiences are defined as any activity that is educationally or occupationally related to one’s goals, and are often influenced by personal inputs (i.e., demographics) and background contextual affordances (i.e., access to opportunities). Learning experiences in turn influence self-efficacy expectations (i.e., beliefs about one’s ability to perform a task) and outcome expectations (i.e., beliefs about the consequences of performing a task). These two types of expectations contribute to an individual’s interests, choice goals, and choice actions. A choice goal is the intention or aspiration to pursue a particular activity, while a choice action is the action of either achieving or abandoning that goal. Together, choice goals and choice actions make up a “career choice,” which then leads to performance domains and attainments. This final step in the process is the goal fulfillment or skill development that occurs once a course of action has been taken, and can then influence further learning experiences to start the process over again (Lent et al., 1994; Lent et al., 2003; Lent & Brown, 2006).\

SCCT has been used with engineering education to study various populations including students in co-op programs (Young, 2017), early career engineers (Brunhaver et al., 2013), and established professional engineers (Buse, 2009). In particular, the Pathways of Engineering Alumni Research Survey (PEARS) was designed based on SCCT to explore connections between undergraduate experiences and early career outcomes for engineers by surveying alumni (Chen et al., 2012; Brunhaver, 2015; Brunhaver et al., 2013). Our current study will build on this survey and recommendations from their findings to develop our own survey instrument, adapting as needed for our specific interest in global learning experiences and outcomes. Because the components of the SCCT framework (e.g., self-efficacy, interests) are responsive to particular situations and performance domains, the framework is adaptable to specific contexts as we propose to do in this study (Lent & Brown, 2006).