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This study focuses on assistant principals, the “forgotten future workforce” of educational leadership. We explored the current landscape of assistant principalship within the context of work performance, including both task and discretionary performance, and the future career aspirations of assistant principals from a cross-national perspective. Specifically, the study aimed to fulfill the following objectives: (a) to identify the factors affecting the task and discretionary performance of assistant principals, (b) to identify the factors affecting three future career aspirations of assistant principals, and (c) to determine whether the influences of these factors differ by national origin. Personal initiative and perceived organizational support (POS) were the independent variables. This study also examined the demographic attributes of the participants and their schools. Two randomly selected samples, which composed of 227 Turkish and 144 American assistant principals were the participants. The data-gathering instrument incorporated the revised versions of the Personal Initiative Scale (Fay & Frese, 2001), the Perceived Organizational Support Scale (Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchison, & Sowa, 1986), and the School Organizational Citizenship Behavior Scale (DiPaola & Tschannen-Moran, 2001). The findings of the study showed that personal initiative and POS significantly predicted the task performance, discretionary performance, and certain future career aspirations of assistant principals. National origin appeared to be a significantly differentiating factor of the assistant principals' task performances, discretionary performances, and future career aspirations. We drew conclusions and provided suggestions for future research.

Along with the other Nordic welfare states, Norway has achieved relative gender parity as measured by the Gender Gap Index of the United Nations (Hausmann, Tyson, & Zahidi, 2006) and is therefore looked upon by many as a model in minimising gender gaps in the society. With a 47 per cent share of the active labour force in the country, Norwegian women have had a high level of labour market participation since the late 1980s. In addition, Norway ranks among the top countries in the world in terms of offering women and men equal access to education at all levels, equal access to leadership positions in the workplace and in politics and generous parental leave benefits. Although gender parity in education at all levels as well as in labour market participation is a reality in Norway, there are significant gender differences vis-à-vis in career aspiration among students and the Norwegian labour market is characterized by gender segregation (Foss, 2005) which results in a gender gap in pay where women earn less than men.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate student motivation for undertaking an entrepreneurship education programme and their ultimate employment aspirations through a novel data mining technique. The study considered what relationship certain motivation characteristics have to students’ aspirations, specifically in terms of their intention to be self-employed or employed.

The study examined enrolment data of 720 students on an entrepreneurial education programme, with work statuses of full-time, part-time or unemployed and have known aspirations to either employment or self-employment. The Classification and Ranking Belief Simplex (CaRBS) technique is employed in the classification analyses undertaken, which offers an uncertain reasoning based visual approach to the exposition of findings.

The classification findings demonstrate the level of contribution of the different motivations to the discernment of students with self-employed and employed aspirations. The most contributing aspirations were Start-Up, Interests and Qualifications. For these aspirations, further understanding is provided with respect to gender and student age (in terms of the association with aspirations towards self-employed or employed). For example, with respect to Start-Up, the older the unemployed student, the increasing association with employment rather than self-employment career aspirations.

The study identifies candidate motivation and the demographic profile for student's undertaking an entrepreneurial education programme. Knowing applicant aspirations should inform course design, pedagogy and its inherent flexibility and recognise the specific needs of certain student groups.

The study contributes to the literature examining motivations for undertaking entrepreneurship education and categorising motivating factors. These findings will be of value to both education providers and researchers.

The purpose of this study was to examine factors affecting teachers’ work performance (i.e., task performance and discretionary performance) and career aspirations (i.e., remaining a teacher, seeking promotion to a principalship, and career change). Applying an inclusive social-cognitive perspective, the study integrated the personal, organizational, and leadership domains to explain teachers’ task performance, discretionary performance, and career aspirations. The three domains, represented by the independent variables of self-efficacy, collective efficacy, perceived organizational support, and principal leadership styles, predicted teachers’ work performance and career aspirations. Participants included 897 public school teachers in a southern state in the United States. The data gathering instrument incorporated several previously validated scales on study constructs. The analyses indicated that teacher self-efficacy, collective efficacy, POS, and principal transformational leadership all significantly predicted the teachers’ task performance, discretionary performance, and career aspirations. Study findings suggest directions for future research on factors influencing teachers’ work performance and career aspirations.

Purpose – Research finds that youths who are able to align their educational and occupational ambitions are better able to realize both. In this chapter, we describe when and how the educational, occupational, and family aspirations and expectations of a subgroup of youth often marginalized in traditional status attainment research are aligned.

Methodology/approach – We use qualitative data from the Gautreaux Two program in Chicago, which gave vouchers to families in existing public housing to move to low-poverty and racially diverse areas. Our sample includes in-depth qualitative interviews with 93 children in 57 of the families included in the study.

Findings – Our results show that there are two groups of youths – one group whose educational, family, and occupational ambitions are aligned and one whose ambitions are misaligned. Many of the narratives of the youths whose ambitions are at odds reflect the ways in which competing ideologies of success for inner-city children can lead to misaligned aspirations. Both groups of youths also discuss their awareness of the difficulties they face in realizing even their aligned ambitions.

Research limitations/implications – This research provides implications for policies and programs seeking to improve youths' experiences both in housing mobility programs and disadvantaged neighborhoods and schools.

Originality/value of paper – This chapter adds to previous research by considering how youths' family plans intersect with their educational and occupational ambitions. Also, we explore the alignment of ambitions among a group of youths who may be considered socially marginalized, those who have grown up in urban housing developments.

Building on the self-efficacy theory and self-theories, the purpose of this paper is to investigate students working part-time whilst pursuing full-time higher education in Cambodia. It explores individuals’ part-time working activities, career aspirations and self-efficacy.

Data were collected in a cross-sectional survey of 850 business and social sciences degree students, with 199 (23.4 per cent) usable responses, of which 129 (65.2 per cent of the sample) indicated they currently have a job.

Multiple regression analysis confirmed part-time work as a significant predictor of self-efficacy. There was a positive recognition of the value of part-time work, particularly in informing career aspirations. Female students were significantly more positive about part-time work, demonstrating significantly higher career aspirations than males. Results also suggest that students recognise the value that work experience hold in identifying future career directions and securing the first graduate position.

There are potential implications for approaches to curriculum design and learning, teaching and assessment for universities. There are also clear opportunities to integrate work-based and work-related learning experience into the curriculum and facilitate greater collaboration between higher education institutions and employers in Cambodia.

There are implications for recruitment practices amongst organisations seeking to maximise the benefits derived from an increasingly highly educated workforce, including skills acquisition and development, and self-efficacy.

It investigates the importance of income derived from part-time working to full-time university students in a developing South-East Asian country (Cambodia), where poverty levels and the need to contribute to family income potentially predominate the decision to work while studying.

This paper reports on an exploratory study examining factors which may affect the career choice of accounting students. Although prior studies have examined factors affecting the choice of an accounting major, few studies have examined factors affecting the choice of career of accounting graduates. This study found that more students aspired to become Certified Practising Accountants (CPAs) of the Australian Society of Certified Practicing Accountants (ASCPA) rather than Associate Chartered Accountants (ACAs) of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia (ICAA) This study also found that there were differences in career aspirations between males and females, and between students at different universities. Female students perceived gender discrimination would have a greater adverse effect on their future careers compared with male students, particularly in chartered accounting and industry; and overseas students were more conscious of discrimination than Australian students. There is also some evidence that Big 6 selection practices are perceived as biased.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how work and family aspirations relate to occupational achievements and gender differences herein.

Using data from 2009 the authors examined the relationship between career and childrearing aspirations and occupational achievements of Dutch parents. Using path modeling in Mplus, the authors investigated both direct and indirect pathways where aspirations were related to occupational achievements via time allocations.

The authors found that ranking being promoted instead of a non-career aspiration as the most important job aspiration was positively related to occupational achievements. Surprisingly, the authors also found that ranking childrearing as the most important life role aspiration was positively related to earnings among fathers.

Investigating aspirations in multiple domains simultaneously can provide new information on working parents’ occupational achievements.

The results imply that parents who want to achieve an authority position or high earnings may need to prioritize their promotion aspiration among their job aspirations in order to increase the likelihood of achieving such a position. Moreover, this is likely to require sacrifices outside the work domain, since spending more time on paid work is an important way to achieve this aspiration.

This paper adds to previous research by explicitly taking life role aspirations into account instead of focussing solely on job aspirations. Moreover, this study extends previous research by investigating indirect pathways from aspirations to occupational achievements via family work in addition to the previously found pathway via paid work.

Economic stressors such as job insecurity, job loss, unemployment, and underemployment cause severe difficulties for the workers affected, their families, organizations, and societies overall. Consequently, most past research has taken a thoroughly negative perspective on economic stress, addressing its diverse negative consequences and the ways that people try to cope with them. And even when following the advice provided by the scientific literature, people affected by economic stress will usually end up being off worse than they were before the onset of the stressor.

The current chapter pays credit to this perspective yet also tries to counterbalance it with an alternative one. While acknowledging the vast amount of literature outlining the negative consequences of economic stress on peoples’ well-being and careers, some literature also points at opportunities for a more positive perspective. More specifically, we argue that affected people can use a wide repertoire of behaviors for handling their current situation. Of particular promise in this regard is the concept of career adaptability, generally defined as the ability to change to fit into new career-related circumstances. Indeed, studies show that under certain conditions, career adaptability can facilitate people's search for not just any job but for a qualitatively better job, thus breaking through the spiral of losses usually associated with economic stress.

For the purpose of this argument, we link career adaptability to the concept of proactive coping, analyzing how and under which conditions career adaptability may present a contextualized form of proactive coping. We then address known personal and situational antecedents of career adaptability and show how career adaptability may be fostered and trained among different types of job seekers. We end this chapter with a discussion of open questions as well as directions for future research.