Subject	Education; Developmental and Educational Psychology
Specific subject area	Career development among teacher education students; their vocational motivation and their perceptions of teaching as a profession
Data format	Raw data in .csv (with codes and numbers)
Type of data	.csv file (dataset with codes and numbers)
Data collection	Due to a confidentiality agreement with the original creators of the scale, which restricts the publication of scale items, the author refers to Watt and Richardson [1] for the complete list of items and codes of the original FIT-Choice scale. Similarly, for items and wording adapted for the survey reported in this article, please refer to the author's related research publication [2]. The modified FIT-Choice scale was used for data collection. The survey was conducted online and distributed through email invitations, using voluntary sampling within the teacher education programme at one university. A total of 202 education students submitted their responses. Sampling strata for the data collection were determined based on the research hypotheses and corresponding research questions, as discussed in the research related to this article [2] — participants’ current academic year, when they first considered teaching as a future career option, and their preferred job at the time of the survey.
Data source location	The respondents were enrolled in a teacher education programme at a four-year university in a suburban area of a megalopolis in Japan.
Data accessibility	Repository name: Zenodo Data identification number: doi: 10.5281/zenodo.11485979 Direct URL to data: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11485979 Instructions for accessing these data: The data are available at the above URL.
Related research article	[peer-reviewed, published article] A. Saito, “I chose to receive teacher training because …” Motivations for teaching and career aspirations among teacher education students in Japan, Int. J. Educ. R. Open. 6 (2024) 100330. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedro.2024.100330