Good afternoon everyone, the title of the research paper I reviews is Enhancing work life

balance through AHP modeling of early career decision making by Remigiusz Gawlik.

Introduction

A healthy work life balance is important not only for good health and relationships but is also
important to improve the productivity and performance of the employees.

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How they rank their quality of life determinants to make decision for their career are important to
enhance their level of satisfaction and future decision making.

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So, the objective of the paper is to present the ranking of quality of life determinants for
university students who are about to start their professional activities, while they choose their
future lifestyle.

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The socio economic trend of the present time can be determined by the views of the potential
workforce adults who will soon enter the job market.

AHP and MCDM approach

This is a human resource research, so the paper is based on subjective criteria as the opinion for
quality of life for each individual differ and the criteria are also multiple (4 parent criteria, 16 sub
criteria and 4 alternatives).

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There criteria are also conflicting.

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AHP also helps to determine the decision criteria with ease and simplicity, giving experts ability
to express their thoughts in free, correct and almost perfect manner due to their experience.

Also, having pairwise comparisons help experts and decision markers to compare each criteria
and alternatives with respect to their purpose and goal.
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Likewise, AHP also helped to give weight and rankings to each of the 16 criteria to help come
with ultimate decision.

Methodology

Three independent phases has been carried out as methodology.

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Exploratory research is carried out on a group of experts (university students), in the process of
starting their professional activities. This is taken on 31 young people of European country in 2
weeks period through in depth interviews, group discussions, peer assessment session and
individual essays. These helped to find the set of criteria for the study.

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Secondly, to eliminate non relevant criteria, a self administered web based questionnaires with
limited answer choices were administered on a sample of 1000 young respondents.

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Finally, international experts from a sample of 200 university students are carefully chosen and
the judgments of each evaluators have been attributed equal weights.

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Expert Choice has been used for the analysis and the rankings from the expert were collected
online with the help of the software. The aggregation of individual judgements was done through
weighted geometric mean method.

Through these method, the author came with these criteria and alternatives.

Author’s Findings and Conclusion

The findings of the study revealed the respondents had the strongest preference on career
orientation alternative with the highest prioritization for safety, stability and certainty criteria.
The second preferred life strategy was on income-oriented life strategy. The need for
independence could be the reason for career and income dominance rather than family values
and free time.

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On aggregated prioritization of parent criteria, the highest rank has been provided to safety,
stability and certainty, followed by Work Life Balance, freedom and society and finally Finance.
The author has provided various reasons for the these such as the difference between internal
motivations and those declared publicly by the respondents, the pressure for success from their
environment and the wish to combine colliding life strategies.

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Similarly, the findings also show that highest priority has been provided to the level of income in
Finance sub criteria, keeping contact with friends and family in safety, stability and certainty sub
criteria, living accordingly to high legal and social standards in freedom and society sub criteria
and working accordingly to your qualifications and interests in work life balance sub criteria.

Usefulness of the article

The companies and HR personnel will benefit from the findings. They can set their company
policies and can also base their hire decision and choose employees accordingly to gain better
motivated employees, who more closely follows their own development paths and leave less
space for frustrations and professional burnout.

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Secondly, the findings of the research also helps the students and potential employees who are
about to start their career to better adapt to the labor market trends and lead to the higher life
satisfaction.

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Third, the findings are also relevant to Universities and Schools on how to groom their students
to prepare for their after graduate life.

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Lastly, researchers and academicians can benefit from the research to take up the limitation of
this research and come with more refined findings.

Strength

The study carefully determines the most important factors for the current generation youth before
or as they enter the job market and make their career decisions

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which helps to determine their work life satisfaction in the future.

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Another strength of the study is it has wide coverage of participants, has done exploratory
research and arrived to decision analysis with two stages of expert selection.

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The significant rankings were also collected online with the help of software so there is a
reduced chance of loss or tempering with the data. The filtering of criteria was also done not by
the author himself, but through the experts only.

Weakness

In weakness, we can see, the sample of experts is only university students within the Europe area
it does not give a global picture of the potential workforce adults. Similarly, only university
students are taken as sample.

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The research would have given a clear picture if people with non academic background and also
the people who are already in the work force were included as they have experienced the reality
in the job place.

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The title of the article also doesn’t accurately match the purpose and conclusion of the article.
The title states about enhancing the work life balance, but the purpose of the article is stated to
find the most important factor that determines the quality of life while choosing their future
lifestyle.

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The findings and criteria talks least about the work life balance and is simply stated as one of the
criteria of the main objective of the model.

Conclusion

The findings and conclusion of the research can be agreed to some extent. The independent
nature of people and their priority for University degree has certainly led youths to be more
careers oriented rather than focus on other parameters. This also implies that socio economic
trend of youths are changing.

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Also, it cannot be argued that after work, people would like to spend more time with the family
and friends and want stability and certainty in life.

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However, the research still does not talk particularly about work-life balance and it its
enhancement. The title of the article doesn’t match its purpose and appropriate conclusion is not
provided.