STRENGTHENING ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE IN RAILWAY HUMAN RESOURCES: THE INFLUENCE OF VOCATIONAL AWARENESS AND VOCATIONAL ASPIRATIONS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15282/ijim.19.1.2025.10960Keywords:
Human capital, Career, Vocational, Performance, AttitudeAbstract
The growing railway industry demands organisations and educational institutions to produce high-quality human resources with specific competencies in the railway transportation sector. However, the competitiveness of vocational education graduates is lower compared to university graduates. Therefore, enhancing the skills and competencies of human resources can be achieved by improving the academic performance of vocational students. This study explores the influence of vocational awareness, vocational aspiration, and attitude on the academic performance of students from the Indonesian Railway Polytechnic. Probability simple random sampling was employed to select 212 students from the Railway Transportation Management Program and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) was used for data analysis purposes. The results show that vocational awareness, vocational aspiration, and attitude have an impact on academic performance. This research contributes to the scholarly literature in the field of Resource-Based Theory, whereby personal attributes are considered strategic assets that are difficult to be replicated by competitors. Such insight is valuable for higher education institutions in producing excellent and competitive graduates. This study is limited by the restricted sample size of 140 respondents and the research subjects are students from a single study program. Therefore, future research can expand to include all study programs and across universities in the railway sector for better generalisability of the findings.
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