The specificity of Swiss VET schools is the fact that teachers for vocational subjects have not only to have the highest possible educational degree (usually ISCED 5b or 5a) in their subject field but also a number of years of professional experience in their occupation. Therefore VET teachers can never choose the teaching profession as their first career but have to change career to get into teaching. To convince successful professionals to abandon their initial profession in order to become teachers is not always easy and periodic shortages of teachers, especially in certain occupations are testimonial to this. Therefore it is important to know who is selecting him-/herselves into the teaching profession. This paper specifically investigates the relevance of economic motives (salary) in the decision to become teacher, as such and also in comparison to non-monetary motives. The reason for the economic focus is the fact that in times of teacher shortages policy makers and teacher unions usually try to solve the problem via pay rises. But without any knowledge about the relative salaries (initial job relative to teacher pay), the wage elasticity of the potential supply and the relative importance of non-monetary motives, it is hard to tell whether such policies are efficient and also whether they are successful to attract the right candidates for the teaching profession.

In our paper we analyze four different questions: First, we analyze the relative salary position of those who have decided to become teachers relative to similar people who have decided to stay in their occupation. Our hypothesis is, that potential teachers coming from occupation and industries with high pay relative to the teacher pay will come from the lower parts of the wage distribution compared to their former colleagues and vice versa. Although it is difficult to tell whether prospective teachers that gained less than their colleagues in the same profession will be less effective teachers, the results will tell how attractive the teaching profession is relative to alternative occupations. Second, we will further explore the heterogeneity of the relative individual wage position in the former occupation of the future teachers. This analysis will also help us to understand the relative importance of non-monetary motives. Third, we will analyze the expected wage prospects of teachers, analyzing their personal expectations of the salary of a teacher compared to the alternative of having stayed in the old profession. This will tell us, which groups of teachers have a sufficiently large economic motivation to become teacher and which groups must have non-monetary motives that are sufficiently large to overcome pecuniary disadvantages. Fourth and finally we will calculate a wage elasticity of teacher supply using expected and observed individual wages for teachers and non-teachers.

These analyses together will give educational policy makers and administrators a better indication about the effectiveness of instruments to attract new teachers into VET. A result that could be of international interest as the findings might be relevant to all countries in which teaching as a second occupation is an alternative.

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