The Role of Gender, Employment Status, School Type, and Years of Experience on Career Adaptability and Self-Efficacy of Greek Secondary Education Teachers During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic created an unprecedented natural experiment for examining how demographic and occupational characteristics shape teachers' professional resources during crisis. This study investigated the effects of gender, employment status, school type, and years of experience on career adaptability and general self-efficacy among 202 Greek secondary education teachers (75.2% female; M age = 47.37 years) during the emergency remote teaching (ERT) period. Participants completed the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale – Short Form (CAAS-SF; Maggiori et al., 2017) [8] and the New General Self-Efficacy Scale (NGSE; Chen et al., 2001) [5]. Independent samples t-tests and one-way ANOVAs were conducted to examine group differences, while Pearson correlations were used to explore the role of age and experience. Results showed that gender and employment status did not produce significant differences on either construct. However, school type significantly differentiated teachers on selected career adaptability dimensions, with special education teachers reporting higher adaptability scores. Years of experience showed a small but significant positive correlation with career adaptability (r = .18, p < .05). The findings have implications for targeted professional development and policy support for different teacher subgroups.