Self‐esteem change during the transition from university to work

OBJECTIVE: The current study examined whether the transition from university to work, a major developmental milestone in young adulthood, was related to stability and change in self‐esteem. METHOD: Self‐esteem was assessed in the last year of their master's program (T1) of 163 27‐year old students and 14 months later, when they had graduated and half of them had started a full‐time job (T2). Daily diaries were used to assess the occurrence of achievement‐ and affiliation‐related experiences on 14 consecutive days at T1 and T2. We compared the full‐time job beginners and a comparison group without a full‐time job with regard to their mean‐level change, rank‐order stability and correlated change of self‐esteem and daily experiences. RESULTS: First, job beginners increased in self‐esteem, but the difference to the mean‐level change of the comparison group was only small. Second, self‐esteem was less stable among job beginners than among the comparison group. Third, the changes in achievement‐related daily experiences and self‐esteem correlated positively in the job‐beginner group but not in the comparison group. CONCLUSIONS: The findings underline the role of daily experiences during life transitions for individual differences in self‐esteem change. The discussion calls for accounting for unique transition experiences to advance theory and research on self‐esteem development.