ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an empirical study about the roles of personal capitals in the teachers’ career development. The study was conducted with 90 graduates in education at various Australian universities. Data were collected from a survey and in-depth interviews. The findings informed that to succeed in the teaching profession, human capital was just one of many factors that teachers needed to articulate and keep enriching. Importantly, the findings revealed that optimal employability outcomes were only achieved when the graduates knew how to use their resources to respond to contextual factors appropriately. They had to exercise some level of agency to connect their educational, life and job market experience and align these to labour market goals. This means the chapter extends the discussion offered in other chapters about the significance of resources/capitals in graduates’ education-to-work transitions by unpacking the fluctuation of the capitals at different stages of one’s teaching career. Findings of the study imply that graduates need to see employability as a journey through which they keep building and using capitals. Institutions need to embed not only human capital and various forms of capital in teaching and learning programmes so that graduates could be well resourced for their career sustainability.
