Chan Kai Ting Sharyn (S10173420G)

 

At the start of this project, when asked to pick a topic in relation to the Early Childhood (EC) Sector, the thought of what makes educators leave the industry immediately flashed through my mind. Once, someone had told me that bus drivers earn more than a preschool teacher. Though I still do not know if that is true, it made me think about how the basic salary could be one of the factors contributing to the high turnover rate in the EC sector. As a future educator, I wanted to find out more on what would possibly make me leave the industry since it is an inevitable topic for every job. With this, I set my mind on choosing manpower sustainability as the topic.

Our start was a mix of good and bad - my group mates shared similar thoughts, hence it was easy for us to connect on this topic but as we dived deeper into the topic, there were several changes to be made to our inquiry question. During the process of the transition from “What makes educators leave the industry?” to “What encourages educators to stay in the industry?”, we had a chance to interview a preschool principal who gave us more insight into the issue of high turnover rates. This made us realise that the main concern was the heavy workload and stress -  salary was not the main issue if the educator had put in effort in his/her work. Instead of finding out why educators leave, why not find out how we could make them stay? This is because even if we found out the reasons behind the turnover rates, we would not be able to make a difference in it, therefore, I thought that if we changed our research focus to finding out what encourages educators to stay, we would be able to contribute to something useful and helpful to the EC sector.

 

Despite the several changes that we had to undergo, I am thankful for the process as it made me do more research and increased the knowledge I had of an industry that I would be joining in the future.

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