Understanding Career Decision-Making of Teachers' through the Lens of Job Crafting

Abstract

Teachers are often viewed as having straightforward, 'flat' teaching careers, but their career paths are in fact often quite complex. This qualitative study characterizes the career decision-making processes of 34 teachers in Israel. It relates to the field of career research, with a focus on the 'meaning of work' and job crafting. The present study attempts to extend the limited literature that connects between teachers’ career decision-making processes and job crafting, by examining how teachers' experiences of meaningfulness and meaninglessness serve as an underlying platform for making informed career decisions using different forms of job crafting. The career stories of the teachers included descriptions of their career-related decisions made over a period of ten years. Collected through semi-structured interviews, their stories were analyzed through hermeneutic processes of data analysis and interpretation. The findings of the study revealed that when making career decisions, the teachers applied the promotion-approach-expansion form of job crafting when experiencing meaningfulness. On the other hand, they used the prevention-avoidance-reduction form of job crafting when facing meaninglessness. As a result, applying the promotion-approach-expansion form of job crafting led to decisions of meaningfulness preservation, while utilizing the prevention-avoidance-reduction form of job crafting steered attrition decisions