High-quality teacher education plays a crucial role in the development of successful educational systems around the world. However, educational systems face challenges in relation to attracting and retaining excellent teachers. To meet teacher shortage, the Swedish government introduced alternative programmes that are more flexible than traditional teacher education. This paper aims to analyse a one-year governmental teacher education initiative and provide deeper insight into career changing student teachers´ as well as newly graduated teachers´ transition into the teacher profession. Research questions asked were which students choose to become teachers, why individuals from other professional backgrounds choose to change career and become a teacher, and what aspects student teachers emphasise as crucial for developing their professional identity as teachers of their particular subject content. As such, the results might give implications for the way student teachers are recruited to teacher education programmes and how newly graduated teachers can develop professionally.