Job Perception and the Need for Job Improvement among School Nutrition Teachers in Seoul / 대한지역사회영양학회지

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVES: The objectives of the study were to investigate the school nutrition teachers' perception on their job and to find out recommendations needed for its improvement in order to provide a quality foodservice and nutrition education at schools. METHODS: A total of 219 school nutrition teachers in Seoul were surveyed using self-administered questionnaires. RESULTS: The perceived importance of the 16 job duties was rated 3.8 based on a 5-point scale (1 very unimportant - 5 very important). The importance of six duties including nutrition management, production management, nutrition education, and food safety management were rated over 4 point but that of record-keeping for documents, official reporting, and service management was rated the lowest. Importance-Performance Analysis showed that nutrition management, receiving/storage management, production management, menu management, food safety management, and equipment/facilities management should be emphasized to maintain the current performance of duties. The performance of the nutrition education and counseling needed to be improved since the importance scores were greater than average but the performance scores were lower than the average. Official reporting and miscellaneous jobs were rated the highest for simplification need. More than half of the respondents agreed that equipment/facilities management, miscellaneous jobs, service staff supervision, and service line supervision could be allocated to other school departments. CONCLUSIONS: School nutrition teachers should invest more time and resources on their core job duties such as nutrition management, production management, food safety management, and nutrition education for providing quality foodservice and nutrition education. To reflect the environmental changes of school foodservice, a reasonable staffing index of school nutrition teachers needs to be developed. In addition, hiring an assistant or implementing school nutrition teacher internship programs can be useful to reduce workloads of the nutrition teachers.