Work satisfaction of adult educators in Singapore: an empirical analysis

ABSTRACT

Singapore, like many other countries in the world, is on a journey towards a culture of lifelong learning to keep its workforce competent, resilient, and future-ready in the rapidly changing world of work. In order to realise this, a significant amount of resources has been invested to the training and adult education (TAE) sector. The TAE sector is expecting considerable and evolving skills demands from the TAE professionals specifically from the adult educators who are directly involved in the training delivery and development activities. With the high skills expectations from the profession, it is important to find out the level and predictors of work satisfaction among adult educators so as to provide necessary support for their performance and development. Work characteristics or quality indicators such as income, work autonomy, complexity, intensity, security, career prospect, professional development support, as well as work expectations were examined in relation to adult educators’ work satisfaction. Multivariate analyses show that work autonomy, job security, and professional development support are strong determinants of work satisfaction among adult educators, even after considering adult educators’ work expectations and other employment and individual characteristics.

KEYWORDS:

• Adult educators
• work satisfaction
• training and adult education
• continuing professional development
• job quality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ‘Job satisfaction’ and ‘work satisfaction’ are used interchangeably in this paper. But we prefer to use the word ‘work’ instead of ‘job’ when it comes to adult educators in Singapore because over half of them are not holding a traditional job or position in a company but comprised of freelancers (holding part-time position or contracted as freelancer or adjunct in a TAE company) and industry practitioners (working in industries other than TAE industry, e.g. construction, health, retail, etc. and doing TAE-related work such as in-house training).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the SkillsFuture Singapore Agency [IR044].