CAREER PLANS OF DOCTORAL GRADUATES

Finishing one´s doctoral degree and obtaining the first years of academic practice at the university are most important predominantly for gaining the first experience at the position of an academic worker. The first experience influence the ideas of young people of their career. The experience is connected with the process of adaptation to the conditions at a workplace, in this case – a university. It is possible to assume that the adaptation to the university conditions is supported by the presentation of reality, by how shared opinion and viewpoint is developed and transferred to others. In case of doctoral graduates this means that they accept the social representation spread by the people who work at the given university.

Social representation is a kind of traditional folk wisdom, transferred from one generation of people working at a given institution to the other. To determine how the social representations are accepted by people, we need to know their motivation. We understand motivation as a set of external and internal factors that influence human actions. In the case of doctoral graduates it is possible to talk about personal motivation that leads to satisfying of their social and efficiency needs and the need for a promising career. It is namely the need for a promising career that proved to be dominant in the research which will be part of this study. The statements of the research participants were directed towards their ideas of their future career.

The research that is presented in this chapter was conducted with a group of ten participants. These participants became employed at Czech universities after completion of their post-graduate studies. In the research they are classified as doctoral graduates. All of them are profiled in the field of educational research and have worked at a university for a maximum of five years after completion of doctoral studies. They were hired for the position of academic staff member, not the position of postdoctoral fellow.

Their job description includes:
- teaching, because they are in the position of university teachers,
- involvement in research projects, or they themselves should initiate and create research projects
- publishing activities.

The educational community should know about their work and they should gradually be profiled in the field that they will present.

The basic research method that was used in the research were in-depth interviews.

Such interviews are:
• time consuming,
• intensive as concerns acquiring knowledge of the situation in which the research actors are,
• challenging as concerns the wording of the questions which the researcher gives (there are no key issues, everything is important),
• intensive as far as the environment for the interviews goes.

However, this makes it possible to obtain:
• deeper, more specific information,
• as well as more precise data.