Education is a lifelong process and, given the technological and organizational changes, individuals are more than ever challenged to continuously acquire new knowledge and skills in adulthood. As the demand for further education increases, the need for qualified teaching staff is also growing. In many respects, adult and further education is already the largest educational sector in Germany. But although teaching staff plays the main role with regard to professionalization in this sector, there is still comparatively little empirical knowledge available about teachers in adult education. This is where “Teachers in Adult Education – A Panel Study” (TAEPS) starts. It is a joint project of the German Institute for Adult Education (DIE) and the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi).

The qualifications, professional skills and professional commitment of teaching staff in adult education are of great importance for creating teaching-learning situation and for the learning success. The aim of the TAEPS study is to explore causal factors and contextual conditions for the development of professional activities and to identify concrete interventions for the development and promotion of professional (sub-)competencies. The focus of interest lies on the following questions:

• What professional qualifications do teachers in adult and further education have?
• How do working and living conditions as well as income influence the performance of professional practice and professional competencies?
• How do competencies affect employment and income opportunities in the partial labour market of adult education?
• On which topics and in which ways do teachers in adult and further education acquire additional knowledge and new competencies?

The TAEPS study is intended to establish a comprehensive and sustainable data base on teachers in adult education and make it available for research purposes. The findings based on this data can help with education policy decisions and with the respective providers themselves in ensuring effective adult and further education with better framework conditions for the professionalization and competence development of teaching staff in the long term.

In order to obtain a picture that is as comprehensive as possible, several thousand individuals from all areas of adult education are accompanied over a period of five years and are repeatedly interviewed on various topics. The longitudinal surveys focus on the qualifications, employment conditions, competence profiles as well as the further training activities and ideas of teaching staff. It is intended to cover those socio-economic, demographic, professional and job-specific characteristics as well as competencies that are relevant for examining changes in employment biographies and processes of positioning on the (sub-)labor market of further education in dependence on competence development and professionalism. This individual perspective is expanded through a supplementary cross-sectional survey of randomly selected institutions with further education programs to also gain structural insights.

In addition to the standardized panel surveys with telephone and web-based interviews, the design of the TAEPS study includes three randomized intervention studies based on independent subsamples of the teaching staff survey. The interventions implemented after the first panel wave address selected aspects of professional competence using specially tailored training formats. They aim to identify and test concrete innovations to improve teachers' competencies.

The combined approach delivers information on both the professionalization in adult and further education and the promotion of teaching staff competencies while also enabling the investigation of temporal effects of competence development on employment and income opportunities of teachers.

The data from the TAEPS study are carefully edited by the LIfBi Research Data Center (Forschungsdatenzentrum, FDZ) and published for research purposes in the form of a Scientific Use File. The first Scientific Use File contains the data from the cross-sectional survey of 1,000 institutions with further education offerings and from more than 2,500 participants of the first wave of the longitudinal survey among teachers. Access to the data requires the conclusion of a Data Use Agreement with the LIfBi. Detailed information on the data and the documentation, including all necessary application forms, can be found on the website linked below.

• Project lead and applicant at LIfBi: Dr. Daniel Fuß
• Project duration: 08/2020 - 12/2026
• Funding: Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)
• Link to this page: www.lifbi.de/TAEPS