Scholarship on adult education throughout the life course focuses on the relationship between education and upward mobility. Scholars rarely examine how adults' educational aspirations or trajectories are affected by downward mobility or an increasingly precarious labor market. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with 21 job seekers in the…

This chapter provides individual and institutional strategies for confronting the historical challenges facing community college faculty, especially the prestige model, mission ambiguity, and declining resources.

Background: By attracting high-achieving college graduates and professional career changers, selective alternative certification programs, such as the New York City Teaching Fellows (NYCTF), promise to address pressing teacher shortages while also improving outcomes in hard-to-staff schools. Purpose: Looking at the main patterns in their careers…

Increased attention toward filling skills gaps have prompted community colleges to prepare a new wave of employees. Community colleges have long turned to former industry professionals, now serving as career and technical education (CTE) faculty, to train students for fruitful careers. This narrative inquiry study featured interviews with 20…

This paper analyses a sample of academic 'quit lit' to explore how graduate students might be better prepared for the realities of higher degree research and employment. It will pay particular attention to how graduate programs can provide realistic, transparent career advice and promote alternatives to academic (Alt-ac) employment for graduates.…

With this article, we describe and analyze the experience of a scientist as she delineated the meaning of scientific inquiry and developed a new professional identity as a science teacher educator. Our inquiry adopted a self-study methodology with a variety of data sources, including sixteen-weeks of journal entries, critical friends' meetings and…

While the need for teachers is surging, the supply of teachers is decreasing, resulting in a pervasive teacher shortage (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2019; Sutcher, Darling-Hammond & Carver-Thomas, 2016). Teacher vacancies perpetuate the opportunity gap that already impacts students of color and low-income students across the country…

Principal turnover is a national problem with costly side effects. There is a growing interest in this problem of practice. Although more studies are emerging, there is limited qualitative research into understanding why principals are leaving their positions. This is a basic qualitative study examining the experiences of three former North…

This chapter addresses retirement planning, the impact of late career moves, adjusting to retirement, financial planning, and work options after retirement.

Beginning in 2015, Wisconsin opened teaching positions to new teachers who have considerable experience in different industries instead of having a traditional four-year education degree. These new teachers have considerable experience in their field but are still new teachers and need mentorship and guidance. Experience-based teachers licensed…

The student affairs profession has been aware of a high attrition rate for young professionals for over 40 years. Research into the phenomenon previously sought to identify the rate of attrition and factors leading to attrition. There is a gap in the literature regarding how these young professionals come to make the decision to change careers.…

Nationally, special education teacher turnover is a significant issue for school districts. The problem addressed in this study was the high special education teacher turnover rate in one local school district in North Carolina. Guided by Maslow's hierarchy of needs, this basic qualitative study explored previous special education teachers'…

We study how the introduction of school accountability affects teacher mobility and sorting. We exploit that lower-secondary schools in Oslo became formally accountable to the school district authority for student achievement in 2003 and that the ranking of these schools, based on a value-added measure, became public information in 2005. Using a…

The study investigated the relationships between job satisfaction and career transition competency among middle-aged and older employees. The study adopted a survey method and used purposive sampling to recruit middle-aged and older employees in Taiwan as study participants. A total of 512 questionnaires were distributed, with a response rate of…

The purpose of this research was to develop and validate a new instrument, the Dynamic Career Scale (DCS), which measures four different modes of functioning in facing career failures and challenges (mania, envy, manic reparation, and true reparation) according to Klein's object relations theory. Two studies were respectively conducted on adult…