Career uncertainty is a major stressor for university students, with implications for psychological wellbeing beyond academic life. While prior research has linked career insecurity to burnout, less is known about the role of individual motivational orientations in these experiences. This study uses psychological network analysis to examine the pattern of associations among career insecurity, burnout, and motivation offering perspective on how these constructs interconnect. A cross-sectional design was used to collect data from 2,111 Italian university students, within the framework of the PRO-BEN funding program of the Italian Ministry of University and Research. Career insecurity was measured with the Career Insecurity Scale (Spurk et al., 2016), burnout with the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Student Survey (MBI-SS; Schaufeli et al., 1996), and motivation with the University Student Motivation and Satisfaction Questionnaire, version 2 (TUSMSQ-2; Afzal et al., 2010). Network analysis was used to identify direct associations and central nodes within the network.
Results showed that career insecurity was directly associated with higher burnout cynicism and lower feelings of efficacy. Rejection-avoidance and social pressure-related motivations emerged as the most central nodes, linking career insecurity with burnout. Self-exploration and social-enjoyment motivations also contributed to the overall network structure, suggesting that broader motivational orientations are meaningfully associated with the clustering of insecurity and burnout. Theoretically, rejection-avoidance and social pressure-related motivations capture students' sensitivity to evaluation and performance demands, which are particularly salient under conditions of career uncertainty.
These findings highlight the importance of considering motivational orientations when examining student burnout in the context of career insecurity providing a nuanced map of how insecurity, burnout, and motivation interrelate. Furthermore, the results offer insights for targeted interventions aimed at reducing the psychological costs of career uncertainty among university students.