Understanding career choice motivations: a case study of public school teacher candidates in Singapore

ABSTRACT In response to the rapidly-changing global market, Singapore has started to pay greater attention to educating students to become active and informed citizens with the high-level soft skills needed for the 21st century. This inspired us to examine how the government can effectively recruit a sustained and sufficiently large cohort of potential teachers with high levels of passion and self-efficacy to teach the humanities and social studies (HSS) to today’s young generation. Based on semi-structured interviews with teacher candidates who aim to become HSS secondary school teachers in Singapore, we found that their motivations are shaped not only by fundamental vocational and material forces, but also by various non-material, social and cultural forces, which might build up over time. Particularly, not to mention the values embedded in the HSS, individual trainees’ prior experiences with learning and teaching, their so-called socialization influences from former teachers and/or co-curricular activities, have played a critical role in their goal orientation.