Educational satisfaction and expectation of future careers of the students in the furniture and design education

In Turkey, the furniture industry, consists of %3 of the country's industry, is an important industrial sector over 7 billions of US dollars in trade with export and import capacity. The use of information and technology within the furniture manufacturing industry is a crucial factor in respect to national and international competition. However, the production of information and technology is more important than usage of these two factors. The existence and usage of these two can only be achieved with professional education and qualified workforce. From the perspective drawn, an investigation into the furniture and design education is worth to carry out in terms of identifying students’ educational satisfaction and expectation for future careers concerned with the Turkish furniture industry. A research questionnaire was designed for this purpose and conducted to 200 students, randomly selected from Furniture and Design Education Departments in 5 different universities. The obtained data was analyzed in SPSS for Windows software. The spider method was used for evaluating the data. According to the findings of the research, 40 % of the students want to be professional teacher within the corresponding area, 50 % of them want to have a job within the industry and 10 % of them do not want to continue with this profession. 1643 students enrolled but 1341 students were graduated to be a teacher for the furniture and design departments but only a ratio of 7 % was appointed as a teacher, and remaining ratio of 93 % involuntarily addressed to the furniture industry or other related sectors. With the possible reason of this, the students were not happy (87 %) with the subject area and afraid of future because of not being nominated as a technical teacher by the Ministry of Education. The study ends with the recommendation to improve the furniture and design education in Turkey.