ASSESSING JOB PREFERENCES OF MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION STUDENTS IN THE COVID ERA: A CONJOINT ANALYSIS

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore job attribute preferences of students in the media and communication stream. The study is conducted to get an understanding of job expectations of students in the COVID era that can help provide conceptual guidelines to hiring managers in media houses for future planning of manpower/job offers. Based on the conjoint analysis technique, a questionnaire was designed and responses of 152 students of media and communication were recorded from a university in Delhi/NCR. Estimation of preference function was created using orthogonal arrays. Results of this study suggest that job security is the most preferred attribute which influences job choice decisions of students, second preferred attribute being appropriate work hours. The paper presents an important tool that can be of great use for recruitment managers, to understand the psyche of students and their preferences, which may further help in designing appropriate recruitment policies and create job offers that can attract the suitable talent pool. Results also reveal that high compensation package is not the most preferred attribute anymore, perhaps due to the uncertainty of the times. Limitation of this study is that individual behaviour cannot be ascertained through the survey and data from students of different universities can be studied for more robust results. The paper is novel in approach as it empirically identifies the preferred job attributes of media students amid the pandemic situation, by applying conjoint analysis. Therefore, it gives new insights to understand how the pandemic has affected students’ job expectations and decisions.