Exploring the Career Journeys and Attrition of Former Probation Officers

: A Narrative Inquiry Through the Lens of Career Construction Theory

Abstract

This thesis critically analyses probation officer attrition in England and Wales by exploring how former officers narrate their career journeys, from entering the service to their eventual departure. It investigates how these narratives explain the construction, disruption, and reauthoring of vocational identities and how this process influences decisions to leave the probation service. To achieve this, the study addresses two research questions: the first explores how former probation officers (POs) narrate the development of their vocational identities throughout their careers. The second investigates how these identities were disrupted and subsequently reauthored after leaving the service.
This study employed a two-phase qualitative approach to explore the career journeys of former POs who voluntarily left the service. Phase 1 involved a pilot study that utilised semi-structured interviews involving 24 participants to identify key themes such as motivations for joining, challenges faced during service, and reasons for departure. These themes covered role misalignment, emotional labour, and work seeping into personal lives. The findings from this phase informed Phase 2, which comprised in-depth narrative interviews with 15 participants to explore their stories more thoroughly. Thematic narrative analysis was applied to interpret the data, using Career Construction Theory as an analytical framework. This approach enabled the study to understand how vocational identity was developed, how adaptability resources (concern, control, curiosity, and confidence) were diminished, and how participants reauthored their careers beyond the probation service.
The findings are presented across two chapters, each addressing the research questions mentioned earlier. The first chapter explores vocational identity construction and the challenges of adaptability, emphasising that most participants joined the service to help others, with some joining as a means of career progression; however, attrition among POs increases when one or more adaptability resources are exhausted. The second chapter analyses narrative disruptions, exit, and reauthoring, presenting four typologies of attrition: disrupted calling and adaptive exit, tragic exit, delayed exit/lingering loyalty, and strategic realignment and purposeful pivot. These typologies demonstrate that attrition is varied and represents different pathways, and not all attrition should be viewed negatively as organisational or personal failure.
The study makes a theoretical contribution by extending Career Construction Theory to the occupational exit of probation officers, empirically by developing a new typology of probation officer attrition, and practically by providing recommendations to reduce attrition through supporting officers in maintaining their career adaptability resources. It concludes that the attrition of probation officers is best understood as a process rather than a single event and that vocational identity plays a central role in shaping both departure and reauthoring.

Date of Award	16 Jun 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Portsmouth
Supervisor	Dennis Gough (Supervisor), Dina Santos (Supervisor) & Jemma Tyson (Supervisor)