The growing concern about teacher shortages in secondary education is shared, to different extents, by most OECD countries. The declining attractiveness of the teaching profession, and the subsequent difficulties in attracting and retaining teachers, have become a central concern for education policies. One of the solutions advocated to deal with this issue is to broaden the recruitment pool for teachers, notably by facilitating access to teaching for individuals joining the teaching profession after other professional experiences. In France, as well as in many OECD countries, these so-called 'second-career' teachers represent a growing proportion of applicants and successful candidates in recruitment competitions. These teachers have special characteristics and come from a wide variety of previous professional experiences.

In the international scholarly literature, teachers retraining to enter teaching have been considered a group to be studied separately from teachers with a more traditional background (“second career teachers” as opposed to “first career teachers”, or “traditional entrants”) (Berger & D’Ascoli, 2011). This distinction between these two populations is justified by their particularities (second-career teachers face unique challenges, they bring a particular skillset, they have a specific relationship with pupils and the profession, etc. (Tigchelaar et al., 2009 ; Tigchelaar et al., 2014 ; Dozolme, 2015).

However, the boundaries of this population (and thus its definition) vary greatly depending on the research under consideration. For instance, the minimum amount of years spent in the previous activity that is deemed necessary to be considered a second-career teacher varies from 2 years for Denave (Denave, 2015) to 3 years for Wilkins (Wilkins, 2017), or even 5 years for Négroni (Négroni, 2019).

Putting at a distance the binary division that is typically used, I hypothesize that the population of second career teachers can be heterogeneous in terms of profiles and is thus composed of several groups of individuals who differ in the combinations of experiences they had before joining teaching. Consequently, I question how many trajectory profiles can be found, and how they differ from each other.

The aim of this paper is therefore to highlight individual differences in a population initially thought to be homogeneous (Courgeau & Lelievre, 1989) (by separating first and second career teachers, one assumes some form of homogeneity in the 'second career' category). I propose to study this diversity by creating a typology of the study and professional path for French secondary school teachers to access teaching, using statistical methods of hierarchical classification in a software that is called R. The study is based on data about the career paths of a large population of tenured French teachers. This data was collected as part of a thesis in education sciences.

The result of this typology of the diversity of access path to education is a classification in five groups, ranging from the most linear to the least linear. The three categories with the least linear pathways comprise almost a third of the total population, thus confirming the importance of further taking this population into account. The presence of five classes clearly highlights a diversity in the spectrum of possible and existing trajectories. This result allows us to question and challenge the boundaries usually drawn between first and second career teachers. In addition, different motivations for joining the teaching profession are found depending on the previous trajectory. This debate about the limits of the 'second career' population, and on the diversity of teachers' careers, leads us to conclude that it is a crucial factor to take this into account when considering the integration, professional training and professionalization of these teachers with a particular profile.

I use data from an online survey I distributed in 2022 in all the districts of continental France, to teachers in the French public general secondary system. A total of 4372 teachers responded. The survey includes data on individuals' background before entering the teaching profession, including student, private and professional life, as well as certain subjective dimensions regarding entry into the profession and career transition. I used the method of typological analysis, as it allows to summarize a wide variety of trajectories before entering the profession into a small number of typical paths and enables to link those types to certain characteristics of the individuals. I first constructed a measure of distance between the different trajectories by means of a MCA (multiple correspondence analysis). This analysis makes it possible to determine a distance criterion, in relation to which we consider that the individuals are close to or far from each other, and the distribution of the points on the axes of inertia makes it possible to read and prioritize the information. Secondly, I classified the individual trajectories by means of a hierarchical classification on the principal components created by the MCA. This analysis produces a nested tree partition, which can be visualized by means of a classification tree. The criterion used to aggregate the classes and build the tree is Ward's criterion. The analysis is carried out with R software, through the package FactoMineR.

The typological analysis divides the population into five groups. The group structure shows a gradation, from a direct and linear path of entry into the profession, characterized by its stability (class 1), to a more dynamic, long-term professional career (class 5). The other profiles fall between the two extremes of this spectrum. While most of the careers are still based on a 'classical' entry pattern (67% join teaching right after their studies), one third of the population has gone through some form of path change to join teaching, and have a more cumulative career. What is considered to be a second career teacher in the scientific literature generally covers class 4 and class 5 (sometimes class 3 depending on the chosen factors). The results show that the spectrum of existing trajectories is wide. For this reason, the numbers reported as second career teachers are possibly underestimated. We are moving away from a binary vision in order to give an idea of the complexity of the situations and trajectories that characterize individuals and lead them to teaching. These previous paths are experiences that individuals can acquire, accumulate, and convert into professional resources in teaching. Finally, we find that a change of activity (joining the teaching profession) does not necessarily represent a major disruption in one's career, even after a significant first career in another field. On the contrary, it may be part of an individual’s desire for continuity: career changes are not necessarily characterized by upheaval. The results clearly show the need to broaden the reflection on the notion of what is or is not linear, depending mostly on what the change of activity and the choice of occupation may represent for the individuals themselves and their career pathway.

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