The Personal Resources Influence on Malaysian Graduates’ Career Adaptability via Mentoring as a Mediator

This paper was designed to explore critical factors of personal resources (psychological resources, emotional intelligence, and self-perceived competencies) influencing graduates' career adaptability. This paper is derived from personal resources and career adaptability studies that employed the career construction theory. The relevance of career adaptability has risen significantly in the workplace due to the business environment's demands. Thus, workforces have to develop their self-strengths in knowledge, skills, and relevant competencies in meeting industrial demand. Furthermore, the necessity of career adaptability enables the workforce to thrive in facing unpredictable changes, succeed in their career journey, and remain competitive in the challenging labour market. Since the career adaptability topic is being studied continuously worldwide, it is still limited to Malaysian graduates’ perspectives. Hence, in line with the topic development, this paper promotes a better understanding of career adaptability among new employment groups to be conscious of and prepared for future unanticipated changes in the working world.


Introduction
to be incompatible with industry requirements, resulting in lower-quality graduates. Thereby, graduates encountered difficulties in the first job, felt unprepared for the joined industry, received unsupportive leadership, lacked mentorship, and encountered work with difficult superiors (Monster.Inc, 2020). Job demand, role conflicts, and role ambiguity render them incapable of overcoming task difficulties (Heang et al., 2019). This unsettling working environment and organisational culture's challenges has resulted in job dissatisfaction, occupational stress, and intention to leave (Edwin, 2020;Heang et al., 2019;Kashmoola et al., 2017;Mumu et al., 2021;Puteh et al., 2015;Rozman et al., 2019). The unfit situations influence graduates seeking new job opportunities during their first year of employment, they just stay in one organisation for less than two years and change jobs twice in five years (Puteh et al., 2015). Presumably, graduates are having difficulty adjusting to the workforce, resulting in career indecision, job satisfaction, job quality, and difficulty achieving career success.
The following questions are posed as a result of these circumstances: Why do graduates lack in-demand skills? Why are they unable to convince employers in the hiring process? Were they unprepared prior to graduation? Are they aware of the labour market challenges? And how viable are they for future jobs? In conjunction with that, this paper outlines the importance of a person's career adaptability: to be readily prepared, cope with unprecedented events, and adjust to any circumstances to be relevant in the future (Savickas, 2013). Even though there is an abundance of studies on career adaptability being debated, most of the focus groups concerned adolescents, high school, and tertiary students (Fawehinmi & Yahya, 2018;Francisco & Castano, 2020;Green et al., 2020;Merino-Tejedor et al., 2018;Nilforooshan & Salimi, 2016;Shin & Lee, 2019;Son, 2018). Considering the graduate's skills gap and the lack of graduates' capabilities, this paper conceptualises the personal resources from the perspective of psychological resources, emotional intelligence, and self-perceived competencies' influence on career adaptability.
In responding to a study by Nooriah & Zakiyah, 2015) employability depends on individual factors, the labour market, and organisational practice. Study result has shown that the final year students have no ideas on their future employment, are unprepared for career needs, and doesn't have any strategies to compete in this challenging labor market. Thus, this paper illustrates the personal strength in assisting graduates in thriving in the labour market and serves as a wake-up call to stakeholders such as educational institutions and industrial practitioners to be aligned with the future workforce's working conditions and environmental demands.

Career Adaptability
Career adaptability refers to the ability to adjust to changes in work and working conditions and the predictable tasks of preparing for and participating in the work role (Savickas & Savickas, 2016). The concept is associated with psychosocial resources that involve adapting to changing tasks, engaging in ongoing self-learning, and self-regulating. Career adaptability is vital competency in these current unexpected demands by employers and uncertain career prospects (Guan et al., 2016). The combination of a person's identity and adaptability guides the individual in determining when and how to change. In addition, impressive attitudes, behaviour, and well-developed competencies enable individuals to adapt to diverse environments easily (Savickas & Porfeli, 2012). Employees with high levels of career adaptability can plan for future career tasks (concern), take responsibility for their career development (control), investigate potential future selves and career opportunities (curiosity), and have faith in their ability to solve career-related problems (confidence). Career adaptability, indeed, is bounded by the social, institutional, and cultural context of a multidimensional structure of concern, control, curiosity, and confidence to support and assist the individual to react by strengthening their vocational behaviour toward the unanticipated change (Savickas & Porfeli, 2012).
Thus, with the concerns about graduate unemployment and skill gaps, graduates must have career adaptability and industrial demand skills to succeed in their employment success (Haibo et al., 2018). To achieve career success, graduates must have a long-term career plan, be competitive and relevant in the labour market, and be willing to develop their selfcompetence and value. Encouraging career adaptability among graduates would benefit them to secure suitable jobs, assist in work transition, increase employability, and achieve employment quality (Chen et al., 2020;Fawehinmi & Yahya, 2018;Ibrahim et al., 2021;Monteiro et al., 2019;Yen et al., 2019). Thus, graduates would benefit in the long run from an understanding of personal factors, particularly psychological resources, emotional intelligence, and self-perceived competencies.

The Influence of Personal Resources on Career Adaptability
Personal resources refer to unique individual characteristics, strengths, and abilities to strive and understand the environment to act accordingly toward the situation (Zia et al., 2020). As the environment is unanticipated, individuals must be concerned about their capabilities through strengthening their control to enable them to explore possible future scenarios (Savickas & Porfeli, 2012). Hence, individuals' distinctive characteristics enable them to interact with their environment, but the process of connection necessitates the development of specific competencies to deal with unexpected situations (Ilyana & Siti Raba'ah, 2020).
The workplace challenges require an individual to take a holistic view of his or her surroundings and to be prepared for unforeseeable events. Individuals' strength is critical for thriving in challenging work environments (Jiang, 2017;Le et al., 2019). To enable an individual for an unprecedented work environment, the concept of person-environment fit should be applied. Where the individual must assimilate into their environment through selfawareness, belief in their capability, and strength. Moreover, Malaysian employer's expectation toward graduates to posses' values and personalities (willingness to learn, openness, positive outlook, diversity of interest beyond job responsibilities), as well as the necessary knowledge and skills for the work environment, and competencies that can be applied to specific situations (Cheong et al., 2016). As a result, it is critical for graduates to focus on strengthening their personal resources to develop the career adaptability necessary to deal with and prepare for unanticipated challenges in the future. Thus, this paper emphasises the importance of personal resources within the contexts of psychology (individual internal spirit to believe in themselves for the future), emotion (to react appropriately to the environment), and competency awareness (to be prepared with their capability to strive in the challenging environment) in influencing graduates' career adaptability.

Psychological Resources Influence Career Adaptability
Psychological resources refer to the development of characteristics by having confidence (efficacy), preserving toward goals (hope), positive attributes (optimism), and bouncing back even after failure (resilience) (Luthans et al., 2007). Additionally, those components will inspire a motivational disposition for completing tasks and goals, a person's capacity to adjust to change, even in the face of adversity, and capabilities in strategizing to overcome the obstacles. Some (Bandura, 1994;Othman et al., 2018) view psychological resources as an individual's beliefs and trust in future outcomes, as well as perceived cognitive and affective resources that enable an individual to act and believe the challenges will be beneficial in the long run.
While psychological resources as a proximate predictor to personal resources indicate a positive relationship with career adaptability (Othman et al., 2018;Safavi & Bouzari, 2019), the study of psychological resources indicates individuals with vital psychological resources (efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience) are able to increase the capacity for adaptation, are capable of coping with future turbulent changes, more adaptable on the job and career context (Buyukgoze-Kavas, 2016;Coetzee et al., 2017;Othman et al., 2018;Safavi & Karatepe, 2018). Consequently, psychological resources also affect minimizing job stress (Shabir et al., 2014), employee well-being (Avey et al., 2010), work engagement (Coetzee et al., 2017) implicitly led to career adaptability (Fiori et al., 2015;Urbanaviciute et al., 2019;Yang et al., 2019). Moreover, argued by Fang et al (2018); Santilli et al., (2017) characteristics of hope and optimism are positive attitudes that mediate career adaptability that are able to be led for the future outcome and gain life satisfaction. Through hope and optimism, individuals acquire diverse interests in self-resilience and efficacy that would develop psychological resources that directly affect career adaptability.
Thus, to achieve career adaptability, graduates should increase their self-efficacy by developing self-belief, having hope to overcome the unexpected of a changing world, being an optimist with all available opportunities, and developing self-reliance by enabling them to bounce back after failing to complete a task or meet task expectations. Through these facets, graduates can advance their future beliefs, maintain an open mind, and set positive goals for coping with the environment. Psychological resources as a means of intrinsic essence development could assist graduates in standing on their convictions, thereby preparing them to meet industrial demand. Thus, this paper makes the following hypothesis: H1: There is an indirect influence of psychological resources (efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience) on career adaptability

Emotional Intelligence Influences Career Adaptability
In the interest of an unpredictable working environment and condition, emotional intelligence is crucial for an individual's ability to adapt to uncertain circumstances (Jameson et al., 2016;MichaelPage, 2019;Parmentier et al., 2019). Additionally, emotional intelligence refers to an individual's capacity for self-control when it comes to interacting with others and sustaining and developing social relationships (Serrat, 2017). Emotional intelligence is also a set of interrelated abilities possessed by the individual to deal with emotions (Wong & Law, 2002), an ability to generate feelings and facilitate thoughts of others and oneself (Salovey & Mayer, 1990) enable an individual to control his as well as group members emotion. Hence, this paper adopts Wong & Law (2002) four-dimensional model of emotional intelligence: appraisal and expression of emotion, appraisal, recognition of emotion in others, regulation of emotion in self, and use of emotion to facilitate performance in measuring emotional intelligence and influencing career adaptability.
The debate over the relationship between emotional intelligence and career adaptability continues to arise (Coetzee & Harry, 2014;Eryilmaz et al., 2020;Ilyana & Siti Raba'ah, 2020;Mittal, 2020;Parmentier et al., 2019;Sony & Mekoth, 2016). Harry (2017) argued the fact that emotional intelligence would help people deal with emotions in the workplace, thus reducing occupational stress and enhancing psychological well-being. An individual with high emotional intelligence is concerned with organisational culture, job duties, competitiveness, self-control, and enhancing harmonisation (Serrat, 2017). They are also being categorised as better employees because they are able to concentrate and complete the tasks even though their skills are being underutilised (Wong & Law, 2002).
Ability to regulate emotional intelligence in people's lives, individuals can endure difficulties, specifically in once uncertain situations (Mittal, 2020). Even more, high emotional intelligence affects decision making and participation (Asif Kiyani et al., 2011), job satisfaction, organisational commitment, work engagement, minimising stress, and willingness to perform (Navas & Vijayakumar, 2018). Even though the individual facing a work-related difficulty has an issue to be resolved, those with high levels of emotional intelligence will be better equipped to deal with the uncertainty associated with job challenges, which has resulted in career adaptability.
Concerning newly employed graduates, who have less maturity (Abd Rahman et al., 2020), especially in job experience, they are required to have better control of their emotions in adapting to working challenges. Some (Anastasiou, 2020;Shipley et al., 2010) argued that emotional intelligence is not significant with age. However, people's lives continue to grow, and their age through life experiences affect their emotional intelligence (Badawy & Magdy, 2015). In the life aspect of graduates, a study by Aziz & Pangil (2017) and Pathak et al., (2018) yielded emotional intelligence assist in the school-to-work transition and employability. With strong emotional intelligence, graduates can strategize their future careers and easily thrive in demanding work environments that require them to stay strong. Thus, this paper hypothesised emotional intelligence is a factor that influences career adaptability. H2: There is an indirect influence of emotional intelligence on career adaptability.

Self-perceived Competency Influences Career Adaptability
Though employers are focusing on people with relevant skills, graduates should identify their abilities to succeed in the workplace. As self-perceived competencies are defined by Monteiro et al., (2020) as an individual's perception of one's skills, and ability to distinguish the actual and expected competencies in a related field. However, to become competent graduates, they have to be able to determine relevant industrial competencies and be aware of current and future industry demands that consist of the job skills and work competencies that enable them to perform a job (Akkermans et al., 2013).
As emphasised by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (2021) employers acquire specific skills from graduates such as self-development, good communication, critical thinking, the ability to distinguish equity and inclusion, leadership skills, professionalism, teamwork, and technological expertise. While summarised by Akkermans et al (2013) the career competencies are for better employment thrive, reflective, communicative, and behavioural. Those who can develop a relationship with their job and working conditions are more reflective in their performance of a job and meet task performance expectations. In terms of communication, organisations are looking for those who can speak at the right moment with ideas and exhibit the appropriate behaviour to fit the organization's corporate culture.
Recent studies show that career competencies and self-perceived competencies have a relationship with career adaptability (Akkermans et al., 2018;Dumulescu et al., 2015;Monteiro et al., 2020). In terms of employability, the previous study has shown career competencies are the predictor of preparing tertiary students' employability (Faizah, 2007;Hock & Mandrinos, 2020;Hung & Phuong, 2019;Kaur et al., 2008). Despite, the relationship, graduates' establishment on career adaptability through the acquisition of self-perceived competencies could increase graduates' employability and success in their future careers. Consequently, preparing graduates should not be limited to career competencies; rather, it should focus on career adaptability, which will directly affect employability (Coetzee & Stoltz, 2015;Ismail, 2017). Thus, this paper describes self-perceived competencies as an individual self-awareness over the industrial demand of competencies for employability and hypothesis, H3: There is an indirect influence of self-competencies on career adaptability.

The Role of Mentoring as the Mediator on the Relationship between Personal Factors and Career Adaptability
The extant literature suggests that mentoring mediates the influence of personal and career adaptability. Prior researcher (Hui et al., 2018;Kanten et al., 2017;Son, 2018) indicate that mentoring facilitates career adaptability and that mentoring implemented through organisational learning is effective in assisting graduates with their transition from university to the workplace (Wronka, 2018) and reaffirming a commitment to career advancement (Arora, 2020). Moreover, mentoring would assist graduates in acquiring conceptual and theoretical knowledge, thereby enabling them to cope with, adjust to, and prepare for unexpected work environments.
As defined by (Kram, 1983) mentoring is a one-on-one developmental relationship between senior and junior employees, inexperienced and new employees. There are two types of mentoring functions: psychological and career mentoring. The psychological practice facilitates the development of employees' confidence and work roles effectively. On the other hand, career mentoring is a psychological function integrated with roles as an advancement assistant to support employees in their career success. The mentor, as a role model, provides counselling and coaching as guidance and assistant in facilitating career enhancement as well as professional growth.
In this demanding working environment, mentoring's role as a role model, coach, and psychological counsellor (Lapointe & Vandenberghe, 2017) would strengthen the relationship of individual and career adaptability. By utilising mentoring functions obtained through organisational and management support, mentoring can help regulate the relationship effect between protégé and mentor (Eby & Robertson, 2019;Gyansah & Guantan, 2018). Today's competitive labour market affects employees' ability to obtain the best job opportunities; however, for early-career employees, there is a career value associated with the length of employment in one organisation; therefore, the decision to stay or leave is somewhat dependent on their mentor, who may have an impact on their career future perspectives (Giraud et al., 2019). The interaction between the protégé (particularly the newly employed) and the mentor provides the mentor with direct control over job assignments, career guidance, and job security (Carter & Youssef-Morgan, 2019;Lapointe & Vandenberghe, 2017). Due to graduates' lower level of work maturity, mentoring activities can help mediate the individual by enhancing their personal resources and thus influencing their career adaptability. Thus, this paper's hypothesis. H4: The role of mentoring mediates the relationship between personal resources and career adaptability

Framework of Study
The extant literature on personal factors found in prior research determines the personal factors as a goal orientation (Creed et al., 2009;Yousefi et al., 2011), meaningfulness and emotional intelligence (Harry, 2017), proactive personality, and learning organization orientation (Zia et al., 2020) that have a direct relationship with career adaptability and selfdevelopment. Therefore, changes in society, technology, job demand, and job autonomy affect the indirect effect of personal variables on career adaptability and self-development. However, prior research measuring professional efficacy (Harry, 2017) and job autonomy (Zia et al., 2020) as a mediator did not indirectly relate personal variables to career adaptability and self-development.
Considering the findings of prior studies, mentoring activity is identified as a mediator in this paper to determine whether there is an indirect relationship between personal resources and career adaptability. As stated in the literature, mentoring positively affects people's career development, but there is a scarce empirical study on mediator linkage with career adaptability.
Since employers expect graduates to possess high adaptability, technical skills, and relevant competencies in relevant fields, organisation assistance through mentoring would enhance the expected demand. Thus, prior to graduation, a graduate's personal strength must be developed, and organisation support will assist graduates who are newly employed in adjusting to their new work environment. Figure 1. Personal resources influence career adaptability that is mediated by mentoring.

Theory and Study Context
This paper employ career construction theory to examine the personal resources' influence on career adaptability. Individual adaptability was emphasised by establishing their willingness to adapt and skill enhancement in order to lead their own lives and identities, according to career construction theory (Hartung & Cadaret, 2017). The individual life experience through life roles in school, community, and occupational settings would assist in the working transition and reflect on pursuing career goals. Additionally, the theory asserts interaction between personal and environmental is important in determining an individual's life adjustment (Savickas & Porfeli, 2012). Henceforth, in the dynamic working environment, interpersonal interaction integrated with organisational culture led individuals to view their career paths.
Therefore, career construction theory is appropriate as a framework for establishing graduates' career adaptability. By adopting the career adaptability concept, graduates are able to develop their self-image, acknowledging their self-competencies through life experiences and cultural discourse. In addition, acknowledging their self-strengths, they can explore potential career paths, develop and practice the competencies necessary to thrive in the occupation, and self-regulate in response to unexpected work environments.
Since university to working life is a complex transition, graduates are expected to be self-adaptive to ease in unexpected working conditions (Son, 2018). The ability to thrive in a work environment is developed through readiness and preparation to deal with work-related traumas (Ramos & Lopez, 2018). Accordingly, individuals that possess personal strength positively perceive the facilitation of the career construction process. Additionally, a holistic mentoring experience within an organisation assists graduates in developing a high degree of career adaptability, allowing them to feel at ease in their new life path.

Conclusion and Implication
There is an emerging scope of career adaptability to be discussed. The topic is relevant for individual career self-construction. Through life-theme experience and self-capabilities, people can predict future growth to remain valuable. In this challenging labour market, traditional career movements are no longer effective organisational control, so people must consider their strengths. In the sense of graduates, strengthening their self-control and sense of personal worth could help them increase their employability rate. As a result, collaboration among industry practitioners, academia, and graduates in determining the industrial competencies demanded would reduce the rate of unemployment, job dissatisfaction, and intention to leave among graduates in their new jobs. They can articulate, strengthen, and determine the value of coping with a situation and the organization's role in assisting them in navigating career adaptability. Additionally, this paper could also contribute to the body of knowledge and educate readers about the critical nature of career adaptability.