This article addresses the question of whether the concept of competence-based vocational education and training (VET) is transferable from one cultural context to another. Drawing on theoretical concepts of comparative education and sociological neo-institutionalism, the competence-based VET is defined as a new paradigm and situated within its cultural context. Then a case study of an educational transfer from Switzerland to India is presented. The article concludes that the pedagogical concept of competence-based VET is not universally applicable but includes culturally coined ideas, which need to be taken into account when trying to implement it in distant institutional contexts.