Within the last two years, a shortage of teachers has become increasingly apparent in European countries (Rudnika, 2022; Scheidig & Holmeier, 2021) and beyond (U.S. Department of Education, 2023). Various measures have been proposed as solutions to this problem, including making all teachers full-time, encouraging career changers, or even employing students before the end of their studies (see, for example, the recent statement of The Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany, 2023). In case of Austria, schools increasingly count on undergraduate students who are willing to enter the professional life as fully responsible teachers before completing their bachelor's degree. Being thrown into practice without sufficient education and preparation, this way of dealing with teacher shortage raises concerns about teaching quality, the novice’s professional development and retention, the students' wellbeing, and not least the reputation of the teaching profession. 

This empirical research paper examines the experience of students who enter the teaching profession in secondary schools in the Austrian region of Salzburg-Upper Austria before completing their bachelor's degree. Of particular interest were the framework conditions and relevant support options that the early entrants to the profession found and how they found their way in their new everyday working life.  

In Austria, the regular teacher education curriculum comprises a state-supported induction phase in which the recently graduated novices work in schools with a limited teaching load and are provided with a mentor, who supports them in practice. Students who start working as teachers before completing their bachelor’s degree do not have the opportunity to participate in the state-supported induction program. This means that they have to find their way into the profession entirely on their own and without any structurally planned professional support, which exposes them to the risks of overload, failure, and early drop out from their jobs (Ingersoll & Smith, 2004). In addition, they lack the practice of instructed and accompanied reflection with professional mentors, in which they develop their scientific-reflective habitus in terms of Helsper’s concept of double professionalisation (Helsper 2001). Professional support during the pivotal phase of induction helps the novices to go beyond mere copying and learning from others by finding their voice and way of being a teacher and, in so doing, contribute to the advancement and further development of the profession (see e.g. DeBolt, 1992; Dammerer, 2019; Keller-Schneider, 2020). 

From this perspective, structure-related problems at their career entry seemed predictable for the undergraduate students and ultimately led to the research interest of the study: the experience of career entry between (lack of) support and experience of stress. In addition, we intend to compare our results with the experience of those students who did not decide to start teaching at an early stage, but rather follow the regular curriculum with the induction phase. Their experience has been investigated by a nationwide, large-scale study in 2021 (Prenzel et al., 2021; Huber et al., 2022). The purpose of our qualitative-empirical study is to find factors for the experience of early career entry for undergraduates which can be used for a large-scale survey at a later point of time. 

Our study is based on six semi-structured interviews with students who are already working as teachers without having finished their bachelor's degree. We investigate their current situation and the conditions under which they work and study, and what kind of support they receive. The interviews lasted between 20 and 45 minutes and were conducted in July and November 2022. We developed an interview guide with some open questions where we ask the students to talk about their current situation and how they are dealing with the challenges of working and studying at the same time. The second part of the interview guide contains specific questions from the study conducted by Prenzel et al. (2021). These questions deal with aspects in class preparation, well-being, challenges in different professional areas at school, the student teachers’ development, and their motives. Finally, we asked the students what kind of support they wished for in their current situation. For the analysis, we draw on the framework of qualitative content analysis as provided by Mayring (2007). More specifically, we used a summarising approach (ibid., p. 59) in arranging and condensing the data material, which allowed us to analyse how students with different backgrounds talk about their early entrance into work life and how they describe their current situation. The challenges, motives and attitudes becoming visible in the students’ descriptions were of further interest in our analysis.

The preliminary analysis of our interviews reveals that the students seem very satisfied with their decision to start their career as an undergraduate. No matter how challenging the conditions are – some of them work in schools in disadvantaged areas and others have already taken responsibility for demanding and challenging additional assignments – the students appreciate the possibility of working and becoming part of a professional community. They experience comprehensive support and appreciation from their colleagues at work but deplore the rather inflexible structures at their academic institutions. Although struggling hard with time and performance pressure in combining work life with their studies, the students obviously do not feel disadvantaged compared to regular students who undergo the official period of induction. One of the reasons might be that they consider their jobs as a way to finance their studies with the privilege of doing precisely what they initially aimed for: to work as a teacher. The students describe the quality of their teaching as high and are quite satisfied with their level of professionality. However, this quality is rather defined by experiencing “control” over the situation and that the impression that pupils and colleagues seem satisfied. Since they have had little exposure to learning theory concepts and instructional development in their studies, an effect could occur that Kruger and Dunning (1999) describe as a phase of learning in which learners can only reflect on their actions to a limited extent because theoretical knowledge is not yet strong enough. Although the student teachers obviously experience their work as fulfilling and satisfying, our data show that the students bear a heavy burden, which they have chosen for personal reasons. As pioneers, their idealistic commitment has become the basis for dealing with the problem of teacher shortage, at the cost of withheld professional development and extremely demanding conditions.

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