Social cognitive factors affecting career choice in mobile app development: Comparing between employed and unemployed programming students

In Africa, there has been an explosion of mobile and an uncomfortable growth of graduate unemployment, including in the field of ICT. In this paper, we investigated the interest in a career in mobile app development between unemployed and employed students studying programming subjects at a distance-learning institution. Distance-learning offers individuals the ability to study while at the same time to work. The paper drew on social cognitive career theory. The key findings from the 236 responses suggest that unemployed students are more inclined to consider a career in app development. It was also noticeable that female students are as interested in app development as their male counterparts. The paper concludes that higher education institutions need to pay closer attention to unemployed students in order to grow the base of app developers producing locally relevant African apps.