An Empirical Study of Transformative Learning Resulting Due to Profession Change

Abstract

A career choice may emerge or be adopted due to personal interest or to balance a range of factors like familial influences, educational qualifications and economic considerations. Once a choice has been made, some follow the one life, one career paradigm and settle soon. In contrast, the career trajectories of some others may involve journeying through multiple professions. Since stories of such journeys often evoke curiosity and reflection, scholarly inquiries into this phenomenon are common in the domain of career theory. However, somewhat underrepresented is the transformative influence of profession change. In this work, we used the Transformative Learning theory of Jack Mezirow to study the personal transformation of profession changers. For this, we reviewed select literature from five domains: Education , Adult Education , Philosophies and Theories of Adult Education and Learning , Transformative Learning and Profession Change and Transformative Learning . This led to the realisation of multiple open areas in the existing scholarship. Subsequently, the following four objectives were framed to address some of the identified gaps: 1. To create a conceptual framework to describe the transformative journey of profession change. 2. To operationalise Mezirow s conception of six types of Habits of Mind so that extent of transformation of a profession changer could be measured. 3. To establish a measure for comparing previous and current professions of a profession changer. 4. To predict the likelihood of observing Transformative Learning amongst profession changers using information related to personal history and current and previous professions. Methodologically, our approach to every objective was primarily decided by three considerations: insights from extant literature, empirical data, and the direction provided by the objective. The data was obtained from 319 profession changers from India using a structured questionnaire. For analyses, we used suitable techniques and computational tools. Infe...