In the Portuguese educational system, the choice of the secondary education course is an important decision in which 8th and 9th grades students are involved. This career decision can be extremely challenging and can have medium and long-term effects on the individuals’ life courses (Germeijs and Verschueren, 2007; Saka and Gati, 2007). Despite not being a homogeneous group on how they solve vocational tasks, adolescents must explore different training paths and reflect about their interests, aspirations, and personal projects (Gamboa et al., 2014; Paixão and Gamboa, 2017). According to literature, there are two main reasons on why the career decisions that 8th and 9th grade students are involved can be so demanding: 1) the possible inexperience in making career decisions and the absence of objective criteria to support a good decision; and 2) the increasing complexity that characterizes the occupational world (Savickas, 2005; Blustein, 2006). In addition, these decisions may also be accompanied by high levels of anxiety, which may require the security and structure that is provided by parental support (Kenny and Medvide, 2013; Katz et al., 2018). In fact, parental support has been widely considered as being crucial to develop career adaptive behaviors (e.g., career exploration) (e.g., Whiston and Keller, 2004; Hartung et al., 2005; Kenny and Medvide, 2013; Ahn et al., 2022). Some empirical studies that have analyzed this relationship suggest that greater parental support is associated with higher levels of career exploration (Turan et al., 2014; Guan et al., 2015), and lower levels of indecision (Guay et al., 2003).

According to the career decision-making literature, this relationship may be mediated and moderated by self-regulatory processes, as will be the case of socio-emotional skills (e.g., Young et al., 1997; Blustein and Flum, 1999; Guay et al., 2003; Saka and Gati, 2007; Lent et al., 2016; Lipshits-Braziler et al., 2016; Paixão and Gamboa, 2022). Socio-emotional skills can be defined as the ability to regulate thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, and can be developed throughout life, through formal and informal learning experiences, in school and family contexts, for example (Kankaras and Suarez-Alvarez, 2019). It is during adolescence that we can observe a significant development of these types of self-regulatory skills (e.g., tolerance and curiosity), which can play a crucial role in how students deal with vocational tasks during the transition to secondary education (Chernyshenko et al., 2018). According to Howard and Ferrari (2021), the growing interest in the relationship between socio-emotional skills and career development stems from the idea that managing emotions facilitates exploration and progress in career decision-making. Thus, in complex tasks such as choosing a secondary school course, socio-emotional skills are pivotal in the way each student deals with the stress and ambiguity often associated with career exploration. In other words, students with higher levels of socioemotional skills are less likely to drop out when facing difficulties during career exploration activities (Di Fabio et al., 2012; Di Fabio and Kenny, 2015). The socio-emotional skill of curiosity, which is anchored in openness to experience (OECD, 2021), is defined as the interest in learning and exploring the unknown, and in taking risks. Curiosity may relate to information seeking behaviors associated to the self and occupational contexts. Thus, in our approach to the study of the influence of socioemotional skills we chose to focus on curiosity, as it assumes a crucial role in career exploration and in the most established career theories (e.g., Career Construction Theory, Savickas, 2005). Therefore, the main objective of this study was to analyze the relationship between parental support and career exploration, considering the mediating effect of an important socio-emotional skill: curiosity.

Table 1 shows means, standard deviations, bivariate correlations, and Cronbach Alphas for the variables in study. The four dimensions of the CRPSS were positively correlated with environmental exploration, self-exploration, and curiosity, being the most highlighted values those observed between Emotional Support and Self-Exploration (r = 0.47, p < 0.01) and between Emotional Support and Curiosity (r = 0.44, p < 0.01). Additionally, Curiosity also presented positive correlation with Environmental Exploration (r = 0.25, p < 0.01) and Self-Exploration (r = 0.42, p < 0.01).

In the next step, seven t tests revealed significant gender differences only in Curiosity (t = 2.685, p < 0.01, d = 0.23). Specifically, girls (M = 4.00; SD = 0.59) perceived themselves as more curious than boys (M = 3.86; SD = 0.63). There was no sign of multicollinearity issues among career support variables as we obtained values of Variance Inflation Factors (VIF) < 10 and Tolerance values >0.10 (Kline, 2016). In the last step, we examined the fit indices for the proposed model, which illustrates the hypothesis in study, and it was not found to fit with the data adequately for all criteria, χ²(1, N = 540) = 133.15; RMSEA = 0.50; CFI = 0.92; NFI = 0.92; SRMR = 0.07. We analyzed modification indices and standardized residuals to verify any suggestions that could lead to an improvement to the model that also would conceptually make sense. Using a step-by-step approach and checking fit indices after respective modifications we eliminated nonsignificant direct effects (due to their low reliability), and covariate the residual errors of the exploration variables (Byrne, 2016).

The final model (Figure 1) shows good fit to data χ²(3, N = 540) = 1.49; RMSEA = 0.03; CFI = 0.99; NFI = 0.99; SRMR = 0.01.

The standardized coefficients revealed significant direct effects between Emotional Support and Curiosity (β =0.30, p < 0.01), Environmental Exploration (β =0.24, p < 0.01), and Self-exploration (β =0.44, p < 0.01). Instrumental Assistance emerges as having direct influence on Environmental Exploration (β =0.20, p < 0.01). Career-Related Modeling also shows significant values to Curiosity (β =0.12, p < 0.01) and Environmental Exploration (β =0.11, p < 0.05). The last career related support variable, Verbal Encouragement, seems to be positively associated to higher Curiosity (β =0.14, p < 0.01), Environmental Exploration (β = −0.19, p < 0.01) and Self-Exploration (β = −0.15, p < 0.01). Additionally, we observed that Curiosity has direct influence on Environmental Exploration (β =0.10, p < 0.05) as well as on Self-Exploration (β =0.29, p < 0.01).

We assessed significant indirect effects by computing bias-corrected bootstrap intervals in AMOS 28.0 bootstrapping function (2,000 samples) at 95% confidence intervals (CIs95; Preacher and Hayes, 2008). Here, if the CIs95 of the indirect effect does not include zero, we can consider the existence of mediation effects.

Table 2 summarizes the six significant indirect effects that were found. Curiosity partially mediated the effect of Emotional Support on Environmental Exploration (CI₉₅ [0.001, 0.063], β = 0.03, p < 0.05) and Self-Exploration (CI₉₅ [0.045, 0.135], β = 0.09, p < 0.01). Concerning the relationship between Career-Related Modeling and career exploration variables, Curiosity partially mediates the effect to Environmental-Exploration (CI₉₅ [0.001, 0.031], β = 0.01, p < 0.05) and fully mediates the effect to Self-Exploration (CI₉₅ [0.004, 0.065], β = 0.03, p < 0.05). Finally, results show partial mediation of Curiosity on the effect of Verbal Encouragement on Environmental Exploration is (CI₉₅ [0.001, 0.041], β = 0.01, p < 0.05) and on Self-Exploration (CI₉₅ [0.007, 0.081], β = 0.04, p < 0.05) was also partially mediated by Curiosity.

Globally, the direct and indirect effects found in the final model explain 29% of the variance of self-exploration and 18% of the variance of environmental exploration.

The purpose of this study was to analyze how career-related parental support associates to career exploration behaviors (self and environmental) and in which degree curiosity, as a self-regulatory process, mediated the effect of parental support on career exploration, among a group of 8^th and 9^th grade students. To address our goals, we tested an integrated model through path analysis using AMOS 20.0.

Our correlations analysis allows us to confirm H1, given that we can observe positive correlations between both types of career exploration and all dimensions of parental support. These results agree with the results of some empirical studies carried out in the last few years that support the importance of family on enhancing exploration behaviors (e.g., Dietrich et al., 2011; Guan et al., 2015; Estreia et al., 2018; Maftei et al., 2023), especially when approaching school transitions (Dietrich and Kracke, 2009; Dietrich et al., 2011). Our results also reinforce the assumptions of the relational perspectives of career exploration (e.g., Blustein, 1997; Blustein and Flum, 1999), i.e., the support provided by parents promotes adolescents’ openness to explore the different courses of secondary education and their feasibility.

Correlational analysis also shows positive associations between curiosity and both types of career exploration, helping to confirm H2. These results corroborate studies that support the association between social and emotional skills and career behavior (Young et al., 1997; Farnia et al., 2018; Santos et al., 2018). Meaning, as suggested by Howard and Ferrari (2021), that students’ ability to manage their emotions is crucial to their success in the transition and adjustment to secondary school. In addition, these results are also aligned with OECD (2021) framework that considers curiosity as an important socio-emotional skill related to openness to experience, which is often associated to career exploration behaviors (Lee et al., 2016; Kleine et al., 2021). Similarly, Hirschi et al. (2015) and Li et al. (2015) have shown that curiosity has a positive and significant relationship with career exploration, especially with self-exploration. In summary, and in agreement to relational and self-determination perspectives of career development (e.g., Blustein and Flum, 1999), we can conclude that the most curious students are also those who are most frequently involved in career exploration activities.

H3 can also be confirmed since we can observe positive associations between all variables of parental support and curiosity. However, by analyzing the direct effects on our final model we can observe that, regarding the four types of parental support, affective and emotional behaviors seem to relate to curiosity more strongly than instrumental behaviors (e.g., instrumental assistance). These results help us to partially confirm H4 and reinforce that the perceived emotional support provided by the parental figures might be determinant to develop curiosity towards career subjects (Young et al., 1996, 1997; Di Fabio and Kenny, 2015; Chernyshenko et al., 2018). Thus, considering that career decisions are not easy to make during adolescence, we can conclude that curiosity and confidence to explore the self and the world of work has its roots in the security and structure provided by parents.

The results of the final model show that some of the parental support variables positively associate with environmental exploration (emotional support, instrumental assistance, and career-related modeling) and self-exploration (emotional support), but contrary to what we usually find in literature, it suggests a negative effect of verbal encouragement on these two types of exploration. These results allow us to partially confirm H5. This effect may be related to the nature and content of the items that compose this dimension of perceived parental support (e.g., item – my parents encourage me to make good grades). That is, these students may associate verbal encouragement with greater control and interference from their parental figures (e.g., Boerchi and Tagliabue, 2018) resulting in some inhibition or avoidance to exploration behaviors. In this regard, other studies have expanded the discussion of how important the quality of support in career behaviors can be, stating that a control type of support might be detrimental to adaptive career outcomes (Reeve, 2009; Lent and Brown, 2013; Ryan and Deci, 2019; Paixão and Gamboa, 2022). In addition, instrumental assistance and career-related modeling only associates with environmental exploration. In other words, according to our results, while emotional support helps to answer the question “Who am I?” (self-exploration), the more instrumental modalities of support help to answer the question “What do I want or need?” (Environmental exploration). From a career development viewpoint, we should underscore that career-related parental support does not have the same effect on the two dimensions of career exploration, as observed in the studies conducted by Estreia et al. (2018) and Rodrigues et al. (2017).

H6 can also be confirmed by the results of the final model. As theoretically expected, curiosity seems to play an important self-regulatory role in adolescents’ career transitions (Savickas, 2013). This means that developing this socio-emotional skill can lead to higher levels of career exploration, facilitating the career-decision making process (Creed et al., 2007; Patton and Porfeli, 2007; Kleine et al., 2021; Paixão and Gamboa, 2022).

Lastly, the results partially confirm H7, since that curiosity shows up as partial mediator of the relationship between emotional support, career-related modeling and verbal encouragement and environmental exploration and self-exploration. These results are aligned with the career decision-making literature that suggest a relationship between parental support and career adaptive behaviors (e.g., career exploration) and highlight that this relation might be mediated and moderated by self-regulatory processes (e.g., Young et al., 1997; Blustein and Flum, 1999; Guay et al., 2003; Saka and Gati, 2007; Lent et al., 2016; Lipshits-Braziler et al., 2016; Paixão and Gamboa, 2022). In our final model, we can also observe that curiosity fully mediated the effect of career-related modeling on self-exploration. From our point of view, this result underlines the role of curiosity in more distal strategies of information gathering, as will be the case of career-related modeling (e.g., my parents have taken me to their work). In contrast to more proximal strategies, these distal strategies promote greater complexity and cognitive integration in the process of career exploration. Therefore, we can consider that curiosity can, in fact, constitute a main mechanism in the construction of the new meanings (self-exploration) that result from the learning experiences that take place in family and work contexts.

As in previous studies that analyzed the antecedents of career exploration (e.g., Blustein, 1988, 1997; Patton and Porfeli, 2007; Rodrigues et al., 2017; Maftei et al., 2023), in our model the explained variance of self-exploration and environmental exploration is relatively modest. An analysis that included three variables related to parental support and dispositional optimism, the model tested by Maftei et al. (2023) explained 25% of the career exploration variance. In turn, in the study of Guan et al. (2015), with a sample of Chinese university students, parental support explained about 19% of the variance of career exploration, after controlling for the effects of a wide range of sociodemographic variables. Already in 1997, Blustein hypothesized the existence of other factors associated with career exploration that had not yet been properly identified, mainly those of cognitive-motivational nature. In the present study, we expanded the set of variables capable of explaining exploration behaviors, including socio-emotional skills. We only included curiosity, due to the centrality of this skill in the career literature, leaving out other competences that are theoretically relevant in explaining exploration behaviors. Therefore, in future research, the inclusion of a greater number of socio-emotional skills (e.g., adaptability, empathy, assertiveness, optimism, tolerance, responsibility) may increase the explained variance of career exploration behaviors.

This study offers an important contribution to career literature by showing evidence of the effects of socio-emotional skills, specifically curiosity, on the career exploration behaviors. In fact, despite the relationship between these variables, very few empirical studies present explicit support to these effects. In career domain, socio emotional skills have been widely investigated with an apparent lack of career theoretical frameworks (e.g., Howard and Ferrari, 2021). Our results follow the holistic theories that preconize approaches that integrate simultaneously emotional and career processes (e.g., Young et al., 1996; Hartung, 2011). The tested model helps us to better understand the beneficial effects of socio-emotional skills in career behaviors (e.g., exploration behaviors) and thus contributes to a more integrated view of the relationships observed between emotions and career. Globally, the current article is in line with the substantial research literature that supports the relationship between parental support and career development outcomes (e.g., Ahn et al., 2022; Maftei et al., 2023). Our model incorporated four dimensions of parental support to better explain career exploration and curiosity in accordance with the main propositions of the socio cognitive theory (e.g., Bandura, 1997). Although significantly correlated among each other, in the tested model, the four dimensions of parental support are not identically associated (directly and indirectly) with curiosity and career exploration. Therefore, our results also reinforce the importance of conceptualizing parental support as a multidimensional construct. Also, the mediating effect of curiosity on the relationship between parental support and career exploration leads us to confirm the important role that this socio-emotional skill plays in regulating exploration behaviors and the adjustment to learning and work contexts. We can also draw theoretical implications from this mediation effect. On the one hand, it supports constructivist (e.g., Savickas, 2005) or socio cognitive (e.g., Lent et al., 1994) theories, which consider emotional variables as personal resources that favor agency, self-reflection, and purposeful involvement in vocational tasks. On the other hand, our model also suggests the consolidation of career education models aimed simultaneously at vocational and emotional processes (e.g., Young et al., 1997, 2002; Howard and Ferrari, 2021).

From the point of view of educational policies, the OECD report (2021) argues that in an increasingly turbulent world socio-emotional skills (e.g., curiosity and openness) should be the bedrock of students’ well-being and academic achievement. In this sense, we suggest the systematic and intentional incorporation of the development of these competences in the school curriculum.

Regarding practical implications, these findings suggest the importance of considering socio-emotional skills (such as curiosity) in career interventions. Also, it opens the opportunity to progressively extend the participation of proximal contexts (e.g., families) to career development processes, since that these skills can be: 1) enhanced by greater involvement of those who assume an important role on the individual’s career choices, especially in complex tasks and transitions (e.g., choosing a secondary school course); and 2) developed through formal and informal learning experiences (e.g., school, household context). In this sense, in addition to information about courses and professions (e.g., instrumental support), parents, teachers and school psychologists must provide the necessary emotional support for curiosity and self-exploration. Our results also suggest that the promotion of curiosity should be considered in career intervention, especially in the more distal modalities of occupational information gathering, for example in internships or job shadowing activities. This is because it is precisely in real work contexts that adolescents can more easily explore the different aspects of their selves, test new roles, and develop social and career skills.

The direct and indirect effects found in our final model show that the model has the capacity to better explain self-exploration (29% of variance explained) than environmental exploration (18% of variance explained). Despite these values not being too expressive, it broadens our knowledge about possible significant predictors of career exploration. For instance, this effort meets the gap that some authors have already identified in the literature (e.g., Blustein, 1988, 1997; Patton and Porfeli, 2007; Jiang et al., 2019; Kleine et al., 2021).

As our study is cross-sectional, we suggest that future research could use longitudinal designs that allows a more accurate analysis on the development and role of students’ socioemotional skills before and after entering secondary school. Additionally, in future research, following the conceptual framework adopted by the OECD, we should consider a broader range of socio-emotional skills and analyze them as mediating and moderating variables. That is, if socio-emotional skills refer to different processes (openness to experience, emotional control) we can expect different effects in career exploration. Considering the gender differences observed for the mediating variable (curiosity), this presents an opportunity to be taken into account and addressed in future research, for example, by studying the moderating role of gender in relations between the studied variables. Finally, a person-centered approach could be helpful to explore the role of socio-emotional skills on career exploration behaviors and on perceived parental support among distinct profiles.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

VG designed the study and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. VG, SR, FB, BM, and OP contributed to the study concept and design, discussed the data analyses. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.