Teachers’ professional development (PD) is today part of the broader lifelong learning movement, shaped by an entrepreneurial logic (Ball, 2009; Canário, 2016). As an institutional, political, and media construct, it promotes the idea of lifelong learning. It is clearly linked to the “contingencies of globalization” in education and training policies (Normand & Pacheco, 2014). 

In response to this prevailing injunction, we approach PD through a lens that departs from deficit-oriented perspectives to emphasize opportunities rather than shortcomings (Skytterstad et al., 2025), and to adopt a collaborative and contextualized understanding of professional learning (Enthoven et al., 2023). PD is conceived as an intentional, continuous, and systemic process (Lessard, 2021), rooted in the principle of learning in and for professional practice (Salo et al., 2024). This approach encompasses multiple learning spaces that we investigate among in-service teachers, ranging from formal training and mentoring to informal, team-based learning. 

However, as pointed out by Coppe et al. (2024), research offers little insight into mid-career and late-career teachers (those with more than 20 years of experience), as studies have predominantly focused on early-career teachers. Since the early 2000s, in most Western countries, the profession has faced a crisis due to the shortage of qualified teachers (Dupriez et al., 2023). Consequently, research has primarily concentrated on teacher recruitment, attractiveness, and early-career issues rather than on sustained professional engagement over time. 

In Switzerland, the canton of Vaud offers a particularly revealing case of a profession under transformation. Local education policies have encouraged schools to co-construct key institutional concepts – quality, sustainability, digitalization, inclusive education – fostering the emergence of new roles within school organizations. This diversification of roles reflects new possibilities for teaching careers beyond the classroom. Yet these reconfigurations produce uneven effects on autonomy and recognition across professional segments (Fassa-Recrosio & Bataille, 2019). Paradoxically, several studies report a certain reluctance among teachers to engage in training activities linked to policy initiatives (Girinshuti et al., 2025), often perceived as detached from everyday professional realities (Darling-Hammond, 2009; Lessard, 2021). 

Over the past two years, the University of Teacher Education in Lausanne has undertaken a research-and-development initiative to better understand teachers’ representations, rationales, and needs regarding PD. The project draws on administrative training data and survey results collected from various school professionals. A large-scale quantitative questionnaire was also distributed to all teachers at both compulsory and post-compulsory levels. 

Confronted with seemingly contradictory findings – on the one hand, the multiplication of roles and opportunities; on the other, low participation and persistent reluctance - our contribution examines the links between engagement in PD and engagement in the profession. The analysis combines Kanter’s (1968) theory of commitment with Hughes’s (1997) conception of professional careers. For Kanter, commitment rests on three dimensions: continuance (cost–benefit considerations), affective (emotional attachment) and moral (sense of duty). Consequently, engagement in PD can be seen as a specific form of organizational and professional commitment, involving investments of time, energy, and professional identity. At the same time, following Hughes, professional careers comprise both a core activity and peripheral ones. Within this framework, teaching represents the core professional activity, while other roles performed by teachers may constitute peripheral activities that reshape professional engagement and career trajectories. 

We hypothesize that PD can alternatively reinforce teachers’ attachment to their core teaching activity or act as a gradual reconversion strategy toward peripheral functions – or even as a pathway out of the profession. 

This study adopts a mixed-methods design to articulate two levels of analysis of PD: on the one hand, the institutional level of a teacher education institution that designs and delivers continuing professional development (CPD), and on the other hand, the level of individual career trajectories. It relies on quantitative and qualitative data to highlight the tensions between these two levels. The quantitative data are from an institutional survey sent to more than 14’000 teachers in the canton of Vaud at compulsory and post-compulsory levels, with a 21% response rate (3’146 responses). The survey aimed to identify teachers’ practices and needs regarding CPD. Based on these data, we first describe CPD dynamics through descriptive analyses. We will initially present the reported forms of CPD practices to highlight the diversity of learning spaces mobilized, ranging from formal training to more informal learning arrangements. These practices will then be related to the institutional training needs expressed by the respondents. To assess the degree of commitment implied by different forms of CPD, we distinguish between needs for certificate-bearing programmes – requiring substantial time investment and leading to a qualification – and needs for shorter, non-certifying courses that are less demanding in terms of engagement. In a second step, we focus on the diversity of functions exercised by teachers, particularly those that move away from the core teaching role. We differentiate functions that require specific CPD from those embedded in the school organization that do not call for additional CPD engagement. These descriptive analyses are complemented by tests of associations between variables, using two independent variables: teaching level and teaching experience. The analysis by teaching level seeks to examine effects related to the structure of the education system and to initial teacher education, which also frames the CPD provisions. Teaching experience recoded into three career stages (Coppe et al., 2024), makes it possible to examine the relationship between CPD practices and career stage, and to explore how changes in professional engagement (assuming additional roles within the school), forms of commitment, and CPD needs vary across these stages. The qualitative analyses draw on four in-depth career narratives of mid- and late-career teachers who hold three or more roles beyond classroom teaching. These cases serve to recontextualize and give meaning to the quantitative findings, by illustrating how teachers subjectively interpret their engagement in PD and the diversification of their professional roles.

The expected results of this mixed-methods research should confirm and deepen two key trends identified in preliminary quantitative analyses on the same dataset (Girinshuti & Desponds, 2025): first, the more teachers engage in PD, the more they express new needs for further training; second, mid- and late-career teachers report higher CPD demands than early-career ones. Moreover, a substantial share of respondents holds multiple roles beyond classroom teaching. These findings suggest a resurgence of training needs associated with the increasing complexity of the profession, regardless of career stage. To better understand these dynamics, the qualitative analysis will examine significant events shaping teachers’ professional paths – from initial training to their current practice – viewing these milestones as gateways into diverse learning spaces across the career span (Llorca & Miché, 2023). Inspired by research on critical incidents, this approach assumes that analyzing meaningful episodes can reveal professional learning processes and the evaluative reasoning by which teachers identify and validate experiences relevant to their development (Beijaard, van Driel & Verloop, 1999). Grounded in narrative inquiry, it seeks to illuminate how teachers construct meaning from professional experiences and make sense of turning points in their teaching careers (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). The presentation will articulate three levels of analysis: (1) forms of engagement in CPD according to career stage and professional roles; (2) tensions between institutional training provision and individual learning logics; and (3) the role of PD as a factor sustaining engagement in teaching or supporting gradual transitions toward peripheral functions. By bridging institutional perspectives on PD with the analysis of situated career trajectories, this research highlights the alignments and gaps between continuing education policies and teachers lived professional pathways. The results aim to deepen understanding of PD challenges among experienced teachers – a largely overlooked group in educational research.

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