Teachers in adult and continuing education and training - employment conditions, qualifications, skills

However, the set of data available on those working in continuing education and training still remains incomplete. But this is now about to change. The panel study entitled "Teachers in Adult Education - a Panel Study" (TAEPS) will focus on continuing education and training personnel. TAEPS is being coordinated at the German Institute for Adult Education (DIE) and conducted together with the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi). This study is being funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

TAEPS will provide a set of data over the long term drawn from continuing education and training personnel and relating to qualifications, employment conditions, skills, and perceptions of continuing education and training. The aim is to select several thousand employees on a representative basis from all contexts of continuing education - ranging from adult education institutions via commercial organisations and organisations with a community focus through to companies - and to monitor these initially over a five-year period. Using standardised surveys, key socio-economic features relating to employment history and attitudes to continuing education and training will be recorded over time. Advanced training, on the use of digital media, for example, will also be organised for teaching staff selected at random. The purpose of this is to assess the impacts on the development of individual competencies, the quality of teaching and learning processes, and on working conditions. The longitudinal data collected by the LIfBi will be edited as a scientific use file and permanently made available to the scientific community for research purposes.

Director of DIE, Josef Schrader, is excited about the project: "DIE will not just use the data for its own research, but also show interested colleagues working in the area how to use it. We are therefore playing our part in enabling all those engaged in the area of continuing education and training with issues of professionalisation to develop research ideas based on TAEPS. This is because the working conditions in adult education will change significantly over the coming years due to the coronavirus pandemic. And last but not least, based on this study we shall expand our offers relating to knowledge transfer and in the area of advice to policymakers."