Qualifying for professional careers

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One of the key challenges for our society is how to recruit and qualify professional personnel in education, health and social work. Moreover, pre-service professional programmes are criticized for lack of quality as well as relevance for future professio nal work. On the one hand, graduates from these programmes are confronted by an increased demand for evidence-based knowledge. On the other hand, they are criticised for lacking practical knowledge and skills. These challenges affect the need for qualify ing sufficient number of these professionals as well as the development of their qualifications. This project will therefore address two main issues: (1) Recruitment and retention in pre-service education and professional careers across professions, and ( 2) How pre-service programs qualify for professional work. The interconnectedness between recruitment and professional careers and development of professional competencies will be addressed from different disciplinary angles applying a multi method and lo ngitudinal research design. The project makes use of a longitudinal database for Studies of Recruitment and Qualification in the Professions (StudData) developed over the year and a comprehensive collection of several register data sets from Statistics N orway. The project will also include interview studies and will further our knowledge about recruitment, dropout and professional careers as well as qualifying processes and contents in shorter professional educational programmes . It focuses on pre-schoo l and school teachers, nurses and social workers. A comparative perspective on these professions will expand knowledge generated from within-profession perspectives, and is therefore of great interest for professionals, policy makers and higher education providers.