ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the transition from university to work and considers how the women’s experiences of personal, academic, and professional development have influenced their professional identities. The first section contains biographical data which present the women’s accounts of how they manage the increasing regulation of childhood and the effect of this on work in the Children’s Workforce. The analysis which follows is organised into four themes emerging from the data. The first of these deals with the women’s transition into paid work and how they find ways to accommodate workplace challenges with the aspirations and expectations they brought on their journeys. The second theme focuses on how the women establish professional identities in their paid work. The third theme examines the impact of regulatory frameworks, informed by neo-liberal, managerialist agendas, on their relationships with children in the Children’s Workforce. The fourth theme explores how the women experience hierarchies in their work and draws attention to gendered, classed, and racialised subtexts at the heart of how the Children’s Workforce is constructed.
