Preparing students for their lives beyond schooling appears to be a universal goal of formal education. Much has been done to make mathematics education more "realistic," but such activities nevertheless generally remain within the institutional norms of education. In this article, we assume that pedagogic relations are also an integral part of working life and draw on Bernstein's work to address their significant features in this context. However, unlike participation in formal mathematics education, where the discipline is central, workers are likely to be confronted by, and need to reconcile, a range of other valued workplace discourses, both epistemic and social/cultural in nature. How might mathematics education work towards overcoming the hiatus between these two very different institutional settings? This article will argue that the skills of recontextualisation, central to teachers' work, should be integral to the mathematics education of all future workers. It will consider theoretical perspectives on pedagogic discourse and the consequences of diverse knowledge structures at work, with implications for general and vocational mathematics education.