Factors influencing choosing teaching as a career: South Korean preservice teachers

Revisiting the Factors Influencing Teaching Choice Framework: Exploring What Fits with Virtual Teaching

“…Virtual teachers have high task return with average mean of 4.065 which indicates high social status (Fwu & Wang, 2002), attractive salary packages (Chen et al, 2006) and availability of alternative careers for the teachers in higher education institutes. The results on salary contradict those of previous studies (Fokkens-Bruinsma & Canrinus, 2014;Lee et al, 2019;Ponnock et al, 2018); the probable explanation is that our sample includes teachers teaching in Tier-1 higher-education institutes rather than teachers in remote areas, and hence salary has come out as an important factor, acting as a motivator. Also, teaching is perceived to be a satisfactory choice as a career (M = 3.4258; SD = 0.820).…”

“…From Table 1, it can be inferred that the most influential factor affecting virtual teaching is the institutional value of collaboration (mean [M] = 5.64; standard deviation [SD] = 1.613), followed by teachers' being facilitators of knowledge to students (M = 5.07; SD = 1.399) and job transferability (M = 4.96; SD = 0.825). Contradicting the results of previous studies conducted on the FIT-Choice framework, the results of this study show how in the pandemic period, with teaching going virtual, job transferability has become an important point of consideration (Dhawan, 2020;Purwanto et al, 2020), which rather is of low relevance in usual times (Kilinç et al, 2012;Lin et al, 2012b;Watt & Richardson, 2007), followed by the teachers' self perception to effectively teach virtually and innovate through the processes of teaching (M = 4.26; SD = 0.925), corroborating the results of previous studies that showed that teachers' perception of their ability to teach virtually using information and communications technology (ICT) or in classrooms through traditional methods is a major motivator for their choice of teaching as their career (Akpochafo, 2020;Lin et al, 2012a;Lee et al, 2019). Social factors have been given high value as influential factors in the choice of a teaching career in studies conducted before, but in our results we see some contradiction (Wong & Moorhouse, 2020), where social contribution (M = 3.7559; SD = 0.85289) has a lower mean value in comparison to that in the previous studies (Richardson & Watt, 2006;Sharif et al, 2016;Torsney et al, 2019).…”

“…Teachers research and innovate to add to the existing knowledge through the teaching-learning process, which helps them build their personal brand, as well as helping the institution through better accreditation and ranking (Ghaith & Yaghi, 1997;Guskey, 1988). It can be inferred from the results that teachers perceive the virtual teaching as a high demand and expert career with content expertise which corroborates with the perception of teachers teaching in past studies (Gratacós et al, 2017;Lee et al, 2019;Watt et al, 2012). In the virtual setting, this could be a result of teachers learning new software, understanding technology and trying to catch up with the new virtualteaching challenges being faced by them every day (Mishra et al, 2020).…”

Do “decent work” dimensions lead to work engagement? Empirical evidence from higher education institutions in India

“…Findings revealed "access to health care" as a significant predictor of work engagement among faculty members. Indeed, teaching is a stressful job and is kept as the last option while making career-related decisions in the Indian context (Kumar, 2020); yet, many people choose teaching as a career because of the passion and desire to teach (Lee et al, 2019). According to extant literature, teaching jobs lead to ill psychological or mental health Yin et al, 2018).…”

“…"adequate compensation," "free time and rest" and "interpersonal safe work conditions" were not found to impact the engagement levels of employees. The possible explanations for "adequate compensation" not being seen as a predictor of work engagement are as follows: first, many people join the teaching profession because of the high perceived value of return from the occupation (Lee et al, 2019); second, using evidence from previous studies, compensation has been recognized as a hygiene factor rather than an engagement factor (Bersin, 2015). The "adequate compensation" dimension of "decent work" represents people's assurance that they receive fair living wages for their work by which they enjoy a reasonable good quality of life.…”