ABSTRACT
Teaching was found to be a career which offered incumbents highly structured and orderly career patterns, a major reason for this being that teachers work careers were built within a bureaucratic-type organization. A distinction is drawn in the literature between organisational and occupational careers. In the objective sense teaching was found to be an occupation that offered a variety of different types of careers, both in schools and in various non-school advisory, supervisory and administrative positions. Teachers’ careers were analysed to ascertain how long it took them to achieve particular promotion positions. In addition to analysing the career patterns of ‘normal’ teachers, attention was also directed at those teachers who had been unusually fast in terms of the rate at which they had gained promotion. The career maps and strategies of teachers did not only take account of promotion, but also the types of schools they wanted to work in at various stages in their career.
