Copyright © 2018 Authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. International Journal of Engineering & Technology, 7 (2.10) (2018) 74-75 International Journal of Engineering & Technology Website: www.sciencepubco.com/index.php/IJET Research Paper Career maturity among gifted and talented students in Malaysia Mohd Hakimie Zainal Abidin 1 , Salleh Amata, Mhd Subhan 1 , Mohd Izwan Mahmud 1 , Sallehuddin Ali 1 , Abu Yazid Abu Bakar 1* 1 Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia *Corresponding author E-mail: yazid3338@ukm.edu.my Abstract Career maturity is one of the crucial element for students in the school setting. Career maturity is vital for students to discover their knowledge about their future professions. For gifted and talented students, they may advance from the regular students in discovering their future jobs. This study focusing on career maturity among gifted and talented students in Malaysia. The level of career maturity is measured by the researcher by using Career Maturity Inventory (CMI)-Revised 1995. This research involved 2500 respondents around Malaysia, focusing on boarding schools’ students. The descriptive statistical analysis is used to present the demographic data involving gender, the level of education, and family income of the respondents. The main finding of this research indicates the difference in career maturity between respondents (gifted and talented students) and the regular students. The implications of this research are discussed especially in terms of guidance and counseling provision in boarding school. Keywords: Career Maturity, Gifted and Talented Students, Guidance and Counseling 1. Introduction The concept of career maturity was introduced by Donald Super in 1957, and later followed by Crites who introduced the Career Maturity Inventory (CMI) to measure the level of career maturity among students in school setting in 1978. Career maturity is im- portant for the students to develop attitudes toward their career [1]. Career maturity enable students to be ready to get more infor- mation on their future career path. Dhillon and Kaur [2] found that students in public schools possess a higher career maturity than government schools. This situation indicated that school environment play an important role to increase the career maturity level among the students. However, research on career maturity among gifted and talented students in local schools is really scarce. History showed that since 1906 from Frank Parson era until now, there were many development for gifted and talented education system [3]. Gagné [4] introduced the model of giftedness which consist of two elements; gift and talent. The gifted students need to be monitored by the catalyst in order to be talented. In Malay- sia, some of the identification method to identify the gifted and talented students are using the online test [6] and the assessment of standardized national written tests. Generally, students who passed all stages in the test will be offered to enroll PERMATA pintar National Gifted and Talented Center and the boarding school in Malaysia. Gur [6] divided gifted and talented students to four developmental traits of physical, cognitive, and social do- mains. Wood [7] stated that the best practice for school counselor to do counseling session with the gifted and talented students are by using the counseling relationship, skills sets, developing awareness, program, services, and interventions. Bakar and Ishak [8] stated that career counseling is the most sought services by gifted and talented students in comparison to other services like academic guidance, group counseling, individual counseling, and family counseling. Ignata [9] explains the counselor attitude and the role of the counselor from different models' perspective. Career counseling is the crucial period for high school students to understand themselves in order to plan for their career paths. Based on the developmental theory proposed by Super in 1957, there are different stages of career development, and one of them is the exploration phase between age ranges of 15 to 24 years old. At this stage, an individual student is starting to explore the self and occupational concepts. The gifted and talented students had some issues in career counseling especially in career choices, per- fectionism in career planning, and gender-role barriers in career exploration. Apart from that, the other issue of the gifted and talented students is the need of career counseling [10]. Career Maturity Inventory (CMI) is a well-known instrument to measure the level of career maturity in the world. Since 1961, CMI is governed to measure this variable [11]. This research is using the instrument and try to figure out the answers for the fol- lowing questions: (a) What is the level of the career maturity among gifted and talented students in Malaysia? (b) Are there any relationships between demographic factors and career maturity? 2. Methodology 2.1. Participants The sample comprised of 2500 subjects, in which 1287 (51.5%) out of them were male and 1213 (48.5%) were female. The stu- dents are between 13 to 16 years old and came from different re-