Drop out of training? Stick it out until the end and then change careers? Or stay in the original desired profession in the long term?

In a recent article in the journal Empirical Research in Vocational Education and Training, Katrin Arianta and Michael Goller report on how prospective nurses in their first year of training find answers to this question, which factors influence the development of professional aspirations and which dynamics play a role in such professional decision-making processes.

The article is part of the Special Issue on Dropout in Vocational and Professional Education edited by Viola Deutscher (University of Göttingen), Stefanie Findeisen (University of Konstanz) and Christian Michaelis (University of Göttingen) and is available free of charge (OpenAccess) on the journal's homepage at Springer:

doi.org/10.1186/s40461-024-00170-4

English abstract:

Taking the perspective of career choice as a lifelong, iterative, constructive, and agentic process, the present study focuses on the development of vocational aspirations of nursing trainees; that is, thoughts about a long-term perspective in nursing (i.e., persistence), ideas of finishing the training but changing into another profession after some time (i.e., withdrawal), and decisions to terminate the training before completing the program through a final examination (i.e., dropout). In order to generate detailed insights about the dynamics behind the development of such aspirations during the initial training phase, a qualitative, longitudinal, within-subject study design based on grounded theory was employed. The results mainly show that social interactions with more experienced nurses, practical work experiences, encounters with environments that are either conducive to learning or not, the satisfaction of different needs (e.g., autonomy, competence, belonging, sense of meaningfulness), as well as the associated feelings of well-being affect how vocational aspirations develop over the first year of training. In addition, the study identifies four different patterns of how trainees typically oscillate between thoughts of staying in nursing and leaving the profession in the short or long run: (a) arriving and wanting to stay, (b) staying as a transitional passage, (c) seeking to stay, and (d) exiting as a knee-jerk reaction. The patterns present evidence of a variety of approaches regarding how trainees deal with certain experiences during their training and how the combination of experiences might affect young professionals' subsequent career choices.