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The purpose of this paper is to examine the career motivations of future counseling professionals.

Students completing their Masters of Counseling (n=174) responded to a 30 min survey about their career motivations, counseling career choice satisfaction, planned persistence in the counseling profession and perceptions of the demand and reward structure offered by counseling work. Motivational profiles were educed using hierarchical cluster analysis and compared via MANOVA.

Four distinct profiles were identified: “moderately engaged with family values,” “lower engaged,” “altruistic with family values” and “multiply motivated.” Clusters differed in their perceptions of the demand and reward structure offered by a counseling career, and their level of satisfaction with, and planned persistence in the profession. Cluster composition was unrelated to age, gender or pursuit of previous careers.

Implications for educators pertain to capitalizing on career motivations for different types of entrants, to tailor recruitment and professional preparation.

The authors add to existing literature by drawing on the theoretical lens of expectancy-value theory in a person-centered approach, to the study of counselor motivations, professional perceptions and career choice satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a professional self-efficacy scale for counsellors and psychologists encompassing identified competencies within professional standards from national and related international frameworks for psychologists and counsellors.

An initial opportune sample of postgraduate psychology and counselling students (n=199) completed a ten-minute self-report survey. A subsequent independent sample (n=213) was recruited for cross-validation.

A series of exploratory analyses, consolidated through confirmatory factor analyses and Rasch analysis, identified a well-functioning scale composed of 31 items and five factors (research, ethics, legal matters, assessment and measurement, intervention).

The Psychologist and Counsellor Self-Efficacy Scale (PCES) appears a promising measure, with potential applications for reflective learning and practice, clinical supervision and professional development, and research studies involving psychologists’ and counsellors’ self-perceived competencies. It is unique in being ecologically grounded in national competency frameworks, and extending previous work on self-efficacy for particular competencies to the set of specified attributes outlined in Australian national competency documents. The PCES has potential utility in a variety of applications, including research about training efficacy and clinical supervision, and could be used as one component of a multi-method approach to formative and summative competence assessment for psychologists and counsellors. The scale may be used to assess students’ perceived competencies relative to actual competency growth against national standards, and to identify trainees’ and practitioners’ self-perceived knowledge deficits and target areas for additional training.

Educational psychologists have, over the last half century or so, directed their attention to the study of student motivation. While teachers have not entirely been ignored, there has been little inquiry into teacher motivation that has been systematic and theory-driven. The concentration on students has tended to overlook the centrality of teacher motivations as integral to teachers’ goals, beliefs, perceptions, aspirations, and behaviours, and thereby to student motivations and learning. It is perhaps not surprising that those motivation researchers who have developed robust theories in relation to student learning in educational contexts would begin to turn their attention to teachers, to see whether those same theories might have explanatory power with regard to teacher motivations. Teacher self-efficacy research (e.g., Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2007; Woolfolk Hoy & Burke-Spero, 2005) has made important contributions to the study of teachers. Motivation researchers are now beginning to turn their attention to other aspects of the complex of motivational factors which demand greater attention and exploration. Robust theoretical frameworks already exist in the motivation literature, which can be applied to guide future research in this area. There has recently been a surge of interest, or what we have elsewhere described as a “Zeitgeist” (Watt & Richardson, 2008a) in applying well-developed theories in motivation research, to the domain of teaching.

Why do girls and women progressively opt out of maths‐related study and careers? This study aims to examine motivations influencing female adolescents' choices for maths participation during high school, which has implications for their long‐term careers.

Two longitudinal samples were included from different contexts – one from Sydney, Australia (N=459), and the other from Southeastern Michigan, USA (N=266). Both samples involved adolescents from upper middle‐class backgrounds, from coeducational government schools, and data in both settings were collected in the mid 1990s. Australian data spanned a three‐year period through grades 9 to 11; while the US sample spanned a five‐year period, with data from grades 8, 10, 11, and 12. The Expectancy‐Value model of Eccles (Parsons) et al., framed structural equation modelling analyses for the influences of maths ability‐related beliefs and values on boys' and girls' subsequent choices for senior high maths participation.

Boys selected higher levels of maths than girls in the Australian setting, although not in the US sample. There was no support for gendered maths achievement as a basis for gendered maths participation. Interest in and liking for maths were the strongest influence on the Australian adolescents' choices for maths participation, with ability beliefs also influencing choices over and above prior mathematical achievement. Ability‐related beliefs and different kinds of values also predicted adolescents' choices in the US sample, more strongly for girls than boys.

Interpretations and implications focus on ways to increase girls' and women's retention in the leaky maths pipeline.

Longitudinal data allow one to determine the extent to which different kinds of motivations predict boys' and girls' mathematical course‐taking through senior high school across Australian and US samples. This has implications for their long‐term careers.

Teaching is increasingly recognised as a complex, demanding career. Teachers experience higher levels of stress and burnout than other professionals. The career is subject to heightened levels of public scrutiny and yet offers only modest rewards in the form of social status and income. Drawing on a typological model of coping styles among a diverse sample of German health professionals, we identified six types of emotional coping (Good health, Sparing, (healthy) Ambitious, (path to) Burnout, Diligent, and Wornout) among a longitudinal sample of 612 Australian primary and secondary teachers. A significant outcome of our study was the empirical differentiation between burned out and wornout teachers. This extends the literature on teacher burnout and offers new directions to the study of ‘at risk’ beginning teachers.