Browsing by Author "Alatarvas, Saana"

For a long time, early childhood education (ECE) teaching has been a vocation. In Finland there has been two different possibilities for becoming one: from the University of Faculty of Education or from the University of Applied Sciences degree programme in Social Services. Even though the training programme is different, the assumption is that the knowledge is equal between the graduates. Both institutions are popular and novice ECE teachers graduate and start working in early childhood education. In the same time, early childhood education suffers from lack of qualified teachers. One of the problems seems to be, that during the five first years many of the ECE teachers want to switch or quit working in early childhood education. The aim of this study is to identify novice ECE teachers’ reasons to switch, quit or stay in a current workplace. The material of this study was collected via internet survey. There were various questions which I analyzed by using a qualitative analysis method. The survey was opened for the novice ECE teachers in the end of spring period 2017. I´ve got 17 respondents, in which 7 was graduated in the university and the rest 10 was from university of applied sciences. All the respondents were working in the same region. It’s important to pay attention to good relationship between the coworkers, otherwise it can be a reason to switch a workplace. Other reasons were long distance between home and job and professional reasons. Defendants working experience as an ECE teacher was minor, and that was seen in the answers: you cannot evaluate things you don’t have experience. Sadly, it’s possible that a novice employee lost a satisfaction for the job and it may causes finishing a career. On the other hand, working life is changing and nowadays employees want to be a part of a lifelong learning. In a context of early childhood education, it means that even though ECE teacher has a calling for the job, it doesn’t mean that man need to stay for it for the rest of her/his career. Bachelorettes for the social services has many skills and competence for social work as well, so they can be ECE teacher as long as it feels good and right. Yet this doesn’t mean that working as ECE teacher is less vocational for them than the colleagues whom graduated from the university: when the students apply to a higher school, both options are equal, and the student will calculate the best match to get in.