Conference Agenda

Teachers play a central role in developing and strengthening education systems, and there is broad international consensus that teacher quality is the greatest in-school factor that influences student learning (OECD, 2017; Darling-Hammond, 2023; UNDP, 2023). From this perspective, it is impossible to conceive of educational quality without considering teachers’ preparation, professional suitability, and working conditions, and the capacity of education systems to attract, prepare, and retain adequately qualified teachers (OECD, 2018; UNESCO, 2022).

Nevertheless, ensuring inclusive, equitable, and quality education faces serious challenges due to the current and projected global teacher shortage. International reports warn that teacher shortages constitute a structural phenomenon affecting countries in both the Global North and the Global South, including several European countries, thereby compromising the coverage, stability, and quality of education systems (UNESCO, 2025). The report emphasises that responses to teacher shortages cannot be limited to salary or contractual improvements, but rather require expanding and diversifying pathways into the profession.

In Europe, various studies and reports have indicated that declining enrolment in initial teacher education programmes and high rates of attrition and turnover have intensified teacher shortages, particularly at the secondary education level (Heinz, 2015; Eurydice, 2018; Symeonidis et al., 2025). This trend is consistent with the Chilean context, where a significant teacher shortage is projected, alongside a sustained decline in interest in teaching (CIAE, 2021; Elige Educar, 2021). In both contexts, secondary education emerges as a critical level, due to the demand for specialised disciplinary preparation and greater difficulties in attracting and retaining teachers.

Within this context, second-career pathways into teaching have gained increasing relevance. These programmes enable individuals with prior academic degrees to enter teaching at later stages of their lives, expanding the pool of prospective teachers and diversifying entry profiles (Eurydice, 2018; Ruitenburg & Tigchelaar, 2021). However, despite their potential, there remains limited knowledge about how students entering teaching through these pathways make sense of their decision to change careers.

The literature has identified a range of factors influencing the decision to become a teacher and to remain in the profession: working conditions, remuneration, social status, and intrinsic, extrinsic, and altruistic motivations (Johnson, 2008; Bellei & Valenzuela, 2010; Heinz, 2015; Arribas et al., 2022). However, much of this research has relied on verbal and rational approaches, centred on retrospective and discursive explanations of vocational decision-making. Several authors have argued that such approaches may be insufficient to capture the symbolic, emotional, and biographical dimensions of experience in non-linear trajectories with significant life disruptions (Riessman, 2008; Squire et al., 2014).

Verbal language often organises experience retrospectively and coherently, leaving aside ambivalence, affect, and meanings that are difficult to articulate discursively (Pink, 2013; Rose, 2016). Visual approaches address these limitations by enabling the condensation of experience and the metaphorical representation of complex biographical processes (Pink, 2015; Prosser & Loxley, 2008), making images a particularly fertile resource for exploring how second-career teacher education students represent and re-signify their pathways into teaching in contexts of teacher shortage and diversified entry routes.

The study’s aim is to understand how secondary teacher education students who enter the profession as a second career construct meaning around their pathways into teaching, with particular attention to the symbolic meanings they attribute to their career-change trajectories. The study is guided by the following research question: How do secondary teacher education students who enter the profession as a second career construct meaning around their trajectories into teaching?

Austria is facing an educational crisis since there has been an increasing teacher shortage, especially in STEM subjects. The reasons for this teacher shortage crisis are multifaceted, including a retirement wave, an increase in teacher turnover and students not completing their teacher training programme (BMBWF, 2024). In order to counteract this shortage, the government has decided to offer teaching positions to career changers—that is, people from other professions who wish to pursue a career in teaching.

Career changers in science, technology, engineering or maths subjects are typically professionals with prior work experience in a STEM area (Cuddapah & Stanford, 2015) before they transitioned into teaching. They can be characterised by bringing more work and life experience (Anderson et al., 2014) compared to “traditional” teachers with a university teaching degree. While the aim of recruiting career changers is not only to ensure there are enough STEM teachers in the classroom, the intention is also aimed to attract “professionals or top science graduates” (Watters & Diezmann, 2015, p.164) for these positions. However, as career changers do not have a teaching degree, they must also complete a credentials course consisting of pedagogical and legal topics alongside their teaching responsibilities (BMBWF 2024). Career changers occupy a significant position within the Austrian educational system. Even though they do not have a teaching degree (yet), their number in appointed teaching positions has increased in school year 2023/24 from from 5.5% to 8.4% (Schnider & Braunsteiner, 2024). The significant rise in hired career changers thus highlights their essential part in the teacher shortage crisis.

Existing research has demonstrated that the transition process from one work environment into teaching can pose significant challenges for the development of a professional identity (Day 2012; Monereo, 2022). Therefore, this study seeks to address the research question: “What professional role do career changers have at school at a time of an educational crisis?” Gaining an answer to this question is essential for evaluating their compatibility with the teaching profession and their capacity to develop a sense of professional identification. Furthermore, it is essential to examine career changers’ intentions regarding their long-term commitment to the teaching profession or the possibility of pursuing another career path. The concept of professional identity plays a central role in understanding how individuals perceive themselves as part of a profession and how they establish a sense of belonging and identification with it.

However, since the concept of identity is complex, it requires further elaboration. It includes notions such as “teacher identity”, “professional identity” and “science teacher identity”. They share certain characteristics, for example that any form of identity should be regarded as a process that is subject to change (Beijaard et al., 2004; Pillen et al., 2013). The continuous (Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2013) and fluid (Avraamidou, 2014) aspect are additional characteristics. However, since this paper focuses on the professional role of career changers at schools, the notion of “professional identity” was decided to be the most suitable one as it is a general term that helps avoid assumptions whether career changers are perceived as teachers or science teachers (which might be the case with the notions of “teacher identity” and “science teacher identity”).

Across European education systems, career-change teachers are increasingly recruited in response to persistent teacher shortages, while their specific developmental needs often remain insufficiently addressed within teacher education and induction structures (UNESCO & International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030, 2024). Existing research has examined motivations and entry pathways into teaching as a second career and has shown how prior occupational biographies may shape expectations, strengths and vulnerabilities during the transition into teaching (Tigchelaar et al., 2008). However, comparatively little is known about how career-change teachers themselves interpret their biographical resources and structural tensions in relation to their emerging professional roles across biographical time.

This paper addresses this gap by asking which biographical resources and structural tensions shape career-change teachers’ understandings of their professional roles in secondary education. Situated at the intersection of teacher education and biographical research, the study conceptualises professional role understanding as a dynamic, socially and biographically constructed process that unfolds across past experiences, present institutional positioning, and anticipated futures (Goodson & Gill, 2011). Rather than treating biography as a static background variable, the analysis foregrounds biography as an active resource mobilised in the negotiation of professional identity, legitimacy, and belonging.

Empirically, the paper draws on written reflection portfolios from 50 career-change teachers working in secondary education in Austria. The portfolios were produced within a mandatory, work-based teacher education programme for career-change teachers (HLG) and capture structured biographical reflections on professional role understandings across past, present, and anticipated future perspectives. This multi-temporal design enables an in-depth exploration of how professional roles are narrated, stabilised, and reworked over time under conditions of institutional strain.
Analytically, the study adopts an interpretivist–constructivist epistemology and employs an inductive, grounded theory–oriented analysis, following the Gioia methodology (Gioia et al., 2013). The analysis examines how informant-centric meanings are abstracted into higher-order dimensions of professional role understanding.

The findings show that career-change teachers’ professional role understandings are shaped through a process of relational role negotiation under high-stakes but meaning-laden conditions. Participants enter teaching after consciously disengaging from established careers—a step frequently described as risky, but also as deeply purposeful. While this transition is often marked by an abrupt “cold-water” entry into teaching, that is, assuming full classroom responsibility with minimal structured induction, it is also accompanied by the dual workload of a work-based, in-service teacher education programme (HLG). Yet these challenges are largely framed by participants as manageable and time-limited.
Biographical resources function as robust safety nets that not only buffer pedagogical insecurity and status ambivalence, but also enable confidence, composure, and a strong sense of vocational fit. Structural tensions are experienced as demanding, yet they frequently become productive sites of professional learning, self-reflection, and identity consolidation rather than sources of disengagement.
By theorising career-change entry as a high-stakes, biographically grounded negotiation of professional roles, the paper highlights not only vulnerability, but also the capacity of career-change teachers to transform tension into professional growth. In their reflection portfolios, this negotiation becomes visible in narratives of risk, safety, and professional distinction, through which participants position themselves as both novices and experts over time. The findings thus contribute a nuanced perspective to international research on second-career teachers and point to teacher education and induction programmes that build on biography, recognition, and relational support as resources for sustainable professionalisation.