Project
Guidance of Starting Teachers
Most western countries face increasing teacher shortages, while too many novice teachers leave the occupation within the first years of their career. Schools in general, institutions for Vocational Education and Training (VET) in particular, therefore increasingly implement ‘induction programs’ aimed at building novice teachers’ professional identity, to accelerate their competence development and to smoothen their ‘enculturation’. In this project we work together with different actors (starters, mentors, HRM advisors, team leaders) from several schools for ‘green’ secondary vocational education on improving their induction programs. During the project, we uncovered a variety of factors in novice teachers’ work environment that hindered their induction (varying from ‘lack of time’ to ‘too many different classes in the first year’). These factors go beyond the induction program but are related to the broader HRM system. Hence, under the assumption that the effectiveness of induction programs can be improved by embedding these in the broader HRM system, we try to improve other HRM practices such as recruitment and selection and appraisal and reward as well.