‘To teach or not to teach?’ An exploration of the career choices of educational professionals

This study contributes to the field of educational careers by exploring all educational career choices, whereas existing literature has focused on only a few. Deploying the push-pull-mooring framework (PPM), several undiscovered influential factors regarding educational career choices were captured. Using qualitative research methods, more particularly throughinterviews and focus groups, we revealed PPM factors towards different career choices educational professionals make. Moreover, this study sheds light on what considerations ultimately precede these career decisions. Findings show that influential factors such as support, workload, autonomy, self-efficacy, general job motivation and commitment to students play a relevant role across several educational career choices.