Abstract:

This study attempts to investigate teachers’ motives in joining the teaching profession in Vietnam and examines the correlation between teachers’ career choices and their job satisfaction through a mixed methods research carried out in Lam Dong Province, Vietnam. The findings revealed that the most attractive factors drawing teachers to the career are job security and job status while teachers’ income and working time the least appealing features. Additionally, more than half of the respondents were found to be happy with their decision of joining the teaching profession while around thirteen percent were willing to move to other careers if they had a chance, and about seventeen percent expressed their dissatisfaction of having entered the teaching occupation. The findings also show that teachers’ career motives were weakly correlated with their job satisfaction and reflect the reality of the job market in the educational system, in particular, and in Vietnam, in general, where a great number of people set a stable job in their priority rather than a job of their interest.