VET typically takes place at two educational sites: in VET school and at the workplace. The focus of this article is to analyse how Swedish VET teachers from three different VET programmes create 'sameness and continuity' between in-school training and work-based learning (WBL). Based on qualitative interviews with teachers, their work in…

Students in vocational education may experience situations during on-the-job training in which power relations are strongly manifested, with considerable potential for learning about democracy that have been far from fully explored. Thus, here we analyse how Swedish vocational education and training (VET) students perceived and experienced power…

Purpose: This article investigates female vocational students' strategies for becoming part of a workplace community, what these strategies are and how they are tied to the formation of vocational identities within male-dominated industrial work. Of particular interest is how female students enrolled on Swedish upper secondary industrial…

The aim of this article is to investigate how the formal competence development activities provided by the Production Leap, a workplace development programme (WPDP), were interwoven with everyday work activities and to identify the conditions that enabled learning and employee-driven innovation that contributed to production improvement, in small…

This paper explores teacher learning. It focuses on access to 'communicative learning spaces' (a concept we coin and develop within this paper) and argues that the creation of such spaces can be a powerful enabler of teacher learning. We draw on the findings from three studies conducted in three different countries - Norway, Australia and Sweden.…

Changes in working life require development in vocational education and training (VET) to retain industrial currency. VET teachers are key actors in VET, and their continuing professional development (CPD) in vocational subjects is central to the currency of VET. This study is situated in Sweden, with a mainly school-based VET system where VET…

In a context of considerable interest in apprenticeship in recent years, Cedefop and the OECD decided to explore its future from the perspective of a number of megatrends, including sociodemographic changes, the accelerated adoption of emerging technologies and new forms of work organisation. They also considered how these trends have affected,…

Concise, clear and comprehensive snapshots of vocational education and training systems in EU, Iceland and Norway: this is what the Cedefop Spotlight on VET series offers. Building on individual country Spotlights, this publication provides an overview of VET systems with their distinctive qualities, such as main accession and progression routes…

The aim of this article is to investigate the learning strategies vocational students use to become part of a work community, and how these strategies are related to the formation of a vocational identity at the workplace. Conducting qualitative interviews, data were collected from 44 industrial programme students from six upper secondary schools.…

Apprenticeships are required for many trades and can take different forms. In Sweden, one form can be viewed as a pathway where students complete a three-year-long vocational education in upper secondary school followed by a post-secondary apprenticeship in a particular trade. Another takes the form of vocational training within the framework of…

One of the most important issues in vocational education is the interaction between learning at school and at different workplaces. Students need to transfer what they have learned in and between these different learning arenas. However, little agreement exists among researchers on how to conceptualise and empirically study transfer of learning.…

This report is the result of an explorative study, carried out at a time when interest in apprenticeship for adults was on the rise and research and evidence on the topic was scarce and fragmented. It has explored the topic from a conceptual and theoretical point of view, reviewing relevant existing research. It has also considered a practical…

This handbook, first published in 2014, aims at helping policy makers and social partners understand some of the ways in which learning in the workplace can be encouraged and how its quality can be improved. It is also intended to help them understand some of the ways that such learning can be organised in a structured manner so that it benefits…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to compare, and identify both similarities and differences in, affordances for vocational learning in two contrasting education systems, for construction worker and shop salesperson apprentices, in Swedish contexts. Design/methodology/approach: Data were collected through interviews and observations in two…

In this study, teachers and workplace supervisors in two vocational programmes at a Swedish upper secondary school were interviewed about their experiences of what is important to teach and learn during vocational education. The interviews were analysed thematically by the qualitative method analysis of narratives concerning what the informants…