The present investigation aimed to design and validate a predictive model that includes variables of the individual, the variables of the context and of academic experience and the expectations of results in the choice of the professional career in students of a private university of Arequipa. This is an empirical study, with associative strategy and transversal predictive design, whose population was made up of a total of 2,228 incoming students of the academic period 2022-I, whose data collection technique was the survey and the instrument the questionnaire. Among the results, it was found that gender and age are predictors of the choice of university career, so as academic experience, favorite subject indicator and the outcome expectations.

Education is a process that involves in its achievement a series of crucial moments for the development of the individual, one of them being the continuity of higher education, which is initially established through the choice of a university career, whose action could constitute as a complex act. This article provides a theoretical review of the models based on Bandura’s social cognitive theory and its variants applied to career choice, in which various individual variables such as gender and age intervene; psychological such as self-efficacy and self-regulation of learning; socioeconomic, academic and family, which together must be considered to provide adequate and relevant guidance to students who wish to study a career as part of their life project.