Assessing career adaptability of early childhood teachers in VietNam

ASSESSING CAREER ADAPTABILITY OF EARLY CHILDHOOD TEACHERS IN VIETNAM Hung Le1 VNU HN – University of Education, Hanoi, Vietnam Ngoc Nguyen Soc Trang Teacher Education College, Soc Trang, Vietnam Anh Duong The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia Abstract This research is conducted with the aim of developing an instrument to assess Early Childhood Education (ECE) graduates' career adaptability in order to improve the quality of training in ECE Institutions The instrument constructed based on 45 c[.]

Hung Le1

VNU HN – University of Education, Hanoi, Vietnam

Ngoc Nguyen

Soc Trang Teacher Education College, Soc Trang, Vietnam

Anh Duong

The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

Abstract:

This research is conducted with the aim of developing an instrument to assess Early Childhood Education (ECE) graduates' career adaptability in order to improve the quality of training in ECE Institutions The instrument constructed based on 45 criteria was given to ECE teachers recruited from 2012-2016 at ECE schools in Soc Trang province Results the research show that graduates demonstrate high level in career adaptability The ma-jority of graduates demonstrated professional knowledge and skills appro-priate to their occupation requirements Graduates recruited in 2013 show the highest career adaptability Having just participated in teaching but they have shown their confidence, interest, passion in their career; especially their continuous excitement for learning and nurturing their professional de-velopment.

Keywords: assessment, instrument development, ECE teachers, career

adaptability

1 Literature study

Career adaptability as a connection between professional knowledge and employment

Adaptability is a key factor in human resource development who is high-qualified for the society's wealth The human with high adaptability easily get

1 Email: lthung@vnu.edu.vn

in harmony with surrounding environment and quickly respond to positive and negative impacts of environment (Carpenter and Brock 2008) The principle remains the same with working environment when the changes are inevitable in modern society Career adaptability relates to essential skills to be successful in life McClure (1995) considered two elements of career adaptability which are capable to recognize and analyze the changes that employees have to deal with; and to adjust to response to changes to meet the demand in the context

There have been much research conducted to explore career adaptability Amongst them, Savickas (2005) has described career adaptability as attitudes, beliefs, and competencies grouped in four dimensions: developing a positive concern for an occupational future, enhancing personal control over that future, enacting curiosity to explore future career scenarios, and enhancing personal confidence to pursue future scenarios Career adaptability is defined as a capacity

of a person to address their simple or complicated problems occurring in their career (Duffy, Douglass and Austin 2015) Therefore, those with high career adaptability approached their career goals and success easily because they are decisive in completing given tasks The definition restated the first description

by Savickas and Porfeli (2012) when they refer career adaptivity as someone’s readiness to adapt flexibly to requirements of the new working environment Research on career adaptability helps students to form their goal setting from the time they are studying at the university (Hirschi and Vondracek 2009); form their motivation and self-efficacy (Lent, Brown and Hackett 1994; Savickas 2013);

or predict career adaptability in entrepreneur environment (Tolentino et al., 2014) They will be prepared with skills for their future jobs Besides, career adaptability is considered as a mediator between personality and career engagement (Nilforooshan and Salimi 2016), which involves employees’ personal traits (Tolentino et al., 2014; Zacher, 2014a, 2014b), psychological characteristics (Perera and Mcilveen 2017), and vocational personality (Mcilveen, Beccaria and Burton 2013) These researchers all believe that personalities and characteristics have a strong influence

on each person’s adaptation in the situation of rapid alteration Due to the recognition

of personal traits, one’s life is considered and their future jobs or expected changes are anticipated Therefore, they could develop their professional strategies in the next stages based on setting practical plans

Career engagement and career goal adaptation will help to create career satisfaction and career success for each graduate, according to some researchers such as Johnson and Eby (2011), Mcilveen et al (2013) and Nilforooshan and Salimi (2016) They also hope that the skills they are equipped since the early

stage, enable them to engage and adapt to the requirements and pressure at the real working environment Being experienced with the real situation in internship allows graduates to easily get satisfaction and be successful in their career

Career Construction Theory is the theory referring to vocational behaviors

formed from career choices and how workers utilize their personal traits on meeting work requirements It is one of the theories on occupational personality that help to explain how workers match to work to develop their professions However, it may become harder to understand modern career when vocational models relating to one’s environment and development only focus on pledge and constancy (Savickas 2013) In fact, it should stress on workers’ flexibility and mobility – factors considered to be the keys to innovation at work world

The Lifespan Theory of Control has been used by Martin et al (2012) in

describing the model of adaptability for teachers in which he refers adaptability

as a capacity of someone to adjust their reponses physically and emotionally to the new changes He took one example of a teacher when he/ she has to instruct a new class, he/ she is to utilize available strategies to articulate usual performance

to meet demand of different groups of students

Model of career adaptability

Zahra et al., (2011) has researched on the relation among career adaptability, career concern, the society support and goal orientation In their study, they use the model of the four factors as:

- Career concern (20 items): Financial compacity, personal ability, success ability, opportunities relating to career choice

- Career adaptability (56 items): measuring occupational planning (8 items), professional exploration (6 items), self-exploring (5 items), decision making (16 items), self-adjustment (21 items)

- Goal orientation (13 items): Learning (5 items), productivity demonstration (4 items), avoid productivity orientation (4 items)

- Society support (12 items): from family, friends, and others important persons Savickas (2005, 2013) has proposed the model of career adaptability with

four factors Career curiosity - the ability in exploring and recognizing the

changes of the outside world and personal development opportunity in an effective

way Career confidence - the confidence in making decisions and implementing assigned tasks Career concern is considered as the interest in current career

and personal development in the future Career control - the ability to control

problems generated in the job, in line with our career environment Career Construction Theory suggests that adaptability resources facilitate the regulation

of career goals and behaviors (Savickas 2013)

The most popular instrument to assess career adaptability that has been used widely by international researchers is known as Career Adap-Abilities Scale (CAAS) This scale has been piloted in 13 countries (Savickas and Portfeli 2012) with 5 Likert scale to assess career adaptability The instrument includes 24 items allocated in four factors: Concern, control, confidence, curiosity

In Vietnam, there was one study on the expressions of career adaptability

by Nguyen (2014) This study has mentioned to some key aspects of career adaptability for students when they are in an internship, such as professional willingness; adapting to the content of internship; adapting to professional skills training; adapting to conditions and teaching facilities in the internship; adapting

to related relationships in the internship

Another research was done by Nguyen and Lai (2014) on using the instrument from CAAS scale to assess graduates’ career adaptability who was working at Japanese companies in Hue province at that time The instrument was translated accordingly to suit the Vietnamese context The results of Mean score indicate that the assessment from 24 items has assessed exactly the capacity of graduates who were working for Japanese companies The authors also specified that CAAS could be applied for related research on a wide scale in the country

2 Career adaptability and early childhood education in Vietnam

Most of the studies conducted in Vietnam targeted at students’ adaptability

in other disciplines or final year students in teacher education This adaptability has not been examined over teacher education graduates; however, this ability plays a vital role in improving the quality of teacher education

Therefore, the topic of early childhood education graduates’ adaptability in Soc Trang X College has been chosen This is a case study at Soc Trang which applied a survey for graduates’ responses on their adaptability During the past years, Soc Trang X College has continuously adjusted training programs, teaching method and productivity to enhance the quality of training However, the key factor lies in assessing graduates has not been implemented yet Therefore, the study is significant not only for education sector in general but for teacher education colleges in particular

The purpose of the study was to develp the instruments for assessing early childhood teachers’ adaptability after sometime working as teachers From the model of CAAS by Savickas and Portfeli (2012), the research has conducted survey for experts’ opinions such as: Head - Office of ECE – Department of Education and Training (Soc Trang Province); Deputy Head of ECE Department (Soc Trang Teacher Education College); Teachers at ECE Department (Soc Trang X College); Principals and Vice-Principals of ECE Schools The survey results in combination with National Standards for Early Childhood Teachers (2012) form an instrument for assessment which consists of four factors (career control, career confidence, career curiosity and career concern) with 45 criteria for official survey

3 Research methodology

The research aims at developing a set of instrument that can assess early childhood education graduates’ career adaptability The instrument was then validated and come into official assessment

The research reported here involved conducting a survey by questionnaire for graduates’ current practices in two stages Administrative staffs were surveyed for their opinions on current education quality of ECE and the causal issues for the situation

These 45 criteria were developed based on reference from the questionnaire

of CAAS and career standards for Vietnamese early childhood education and the outcomes of ECE, Soc Trang X College A five level Likert scale is used in this instrument:

1 = This ability is totally not demonstrated

2 = This ability is sometimes demonstrated

3 = This ability is demonstrated at the average level

4 = This ability is demonstrated usually and easily

5 = This ability is demonstrated creatively and very easily

The instrument was then conducted over two stages in two groups of sample The following will present the finding results from these samples

4 Research results in the first sample

The proposed questionnaire was then conducted over the sample of 219 ECE teachers recruited from 2012-2016 by 20 ECE institutions in Soc Trang Province

Table 1 Cronbach Alpha index for each element

ECE graduates’ ability of Cronbach Alpha

Test results show that the instruments got rather high Cronbach’ Alpha reliability from 0.91-0.95 Correlation coefficients among items are above 0.3 This means the instrument has high reliability, items in the questionnaire was developed tightly and logically which measure the same content

KMO and Bartlett’s test shows high KMO index (0.893>0.5), Bartlett’s index remains significant (Sig.=0.000<0.05), which indicates the good use of EFA factor analysis (Table 2)

Table 2 KMO and Bartlett’s test results

KMO and Bartlett’s Test

Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy .893

Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity Approx Chi-Squaredf 12840.454990

Testing by Eigenvalues shows the result above 1; extraction from Principal components (Table 3) and Varimax rotated (Table 4), EFA produces 6 factors in

45 variables with a variance of 70.3% (as required > 50%)

Table 3 Eigenvalues and extracted variance

Total Variance Explained

Initial Eigenvalues Extraction Sums of Squared Loadings Rotation Sums of Squared Loadings

Cumulative

%

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis.

Table 4 Rotated component matrix

a

Factor 1 2 Component3 4 5 6 7

Ability of career control

KS7 884 KS9 882 KS6 867 KS8 704 KS5 681 KS10 647 KS4 637 KS2 592 KS3 589 KS1 505 TT2 381

Ability of career confidence

Ability of career concern

Ability of yourself discovering for

professional development

Ability of professional knowledge studying

Ability of fundamental knowledge studying

Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis

Rotation Method: Varimax with Kaiser Normalization.

a Rotation converged in 8 iterations.

From 4 groups of the questionnaire developed in the beginning, they are now divided into 6 factors:

* Factor 1 (11 items): Ability of career control (one item from group 2)

* Factor 2 (12 items): Ability of career confidence (one item from group 3) There is a change in the order of items in factor 1 and 2 which is appropriate

as evaluated by ECE experts Therefore the order of items in EFA analysis has remained

* Factor 3 (8 items): Ability of career concern

Group 4 (Ability of career curiosity) defined in the beginning has been separated into 3 factors:

* Factor 4 (5 items): renamed “Ability of yourself discovering for professional development”

* Factor 5 (5 items): renamed “Ability of professional knowledge studying”

* Factor 6 (4 items): renamed “Ability of fundamental knowledge studying”

To sum up, according to ECE experts’ evaluation, there is a similarity among factor 4, 5, 6 (divided from one group) Therefore, the analysis model is almost kept the same as the proposed model but the difference in the number of items among factors impacting to ECE graduates’ career adaptability

5 Research results in the second sample

The instrument for assessing ECE graduates’ career ability includes 4 factors with 45 items in total, surveyed by 316 ECE graduates who are working

at 57 ECE institutions in Soc Trang province in 2017 They have been recruited from the cohort in 2012 (N=80); 2013 (N=36); 2014 (N=64); 2015 (N=60); 2016 (N=76)

After being collected, the data was then imported and analyzed by SPSS and Conquest program The procedure of analyzing with the second sample is conducted exactly the same with what have been done with the first sample Demographics analysis results show that 100% of participants are female with diploma degree (college education) graduated from 2003-2016 In which, 41.5% are civil workers; 58.5% are casual workers In terms of graduation qualification, getting high distinction degree accounts for 7.3%; 51.6% and 41.1% are at distinction and credit level respectively There is 87.7% of participants

teaching at ECE institutions at the district level, and 12.3% of the participant is teaching at ECE institutions at the provincial level There is 48.7% of participants whose salary is under 3 million VND/month (low level); 42.4% is from 3-5 million VND/ month (medium level); and 5.4% is above 5 million VND/ month (high level)

Level of content adaptability in each element

Results from descriptive analysis give the fact that all of the items get the average score of 3 (above 5) with M ≥ 3.47 and SD ≥ 0.71

The high Cronbach’ Alpha index starts from 0.917 to 0.950 for each element,

in total it gets 0.93 This means the instrument is reliable for assessing ECE graduates’ career adaptability in Vietnam context

The research makes a comparision between CAAS’s research in 13 countries with the one in Soc Trang (Vietnam) in terms of the factor loading in the following figure It is indicated that the indexes in Vietnam is not as high as the ones in 13 countries but they are acceptable This again means the instruments developed in this research is reliable to use for surveying

Table 5 Confirmatory factor indexes

Factors Soc Trang (Vietnam) 13 countries (CAAS)

Apart from reliability, comparision in Mean score between two research, it could be seen that career adaptability of students remain nearly the same while Mean among factors in Vietnam seems to range wider than the one in CAAS research (Table 5)

Table 6 Mean scores among factors between two researches

Group

Mean

6 Graduates’ career adaptability

The research comes to make a comparision between the Mean scores between two samples as in the table 6 It is indicated from the table that there seems to be

a similarity of the Mean scores in four factors and adaptability in two samples although the career ability in the second sample is a little higher than the one of participants in the first survey

Table7 Mean scores in two samples of the research

Looking at the table 7 below about career adaptability in 5 years (2012-2016), it is shown that graduates own the highest career adaptability are graduates recruited in 2012 with the highest percentage (25.10%), the lowest falls into the year 2013 (11.10%) while that number in graduates recruited in 2014, 2015, and

2016 are 20.8%, 19.10% and 24% respectively

Table 8 Career adaptability in 5 years

Ability of confidence 25.20% 10.90% 20.40% 19.30% 24.10%

Ability of curiosity 24.80% 11.20% 21.00% 19.40% 23.70%

It is investigated that graduates recruited in 2013 who were in the intake

2011 which is the year Soc Trang X College first applied the training type as credit Therefore the College had accounted many obstacles in facilities, sudden shortened time of lecturing, students were required to self learning and self researching without preparation for adjusting learning methods As a result, students graduated in 2013 were not prepared well for their teaching and career requirements

The teaching and learning as credit training had been stable one year after when the obstacles were overcome, resulted in better achievements for teachers and students in the following years