The profession of a vocational teacher has been in a challenging state of change and development especially for the past ten years in Finland after the establishment of polytechnics in higher education sector. The purpose of this paper is to further develop some of the results of my dissertation (2001), which I performed at the National Defence College in Helsinki. The National Defence College is part of the higher education sector. The title for my hermeneutical action research was "The Pedagogical Expertise of the Cadets". In this paper I will focus on some of the main results of my research, especially concentrating on the concept of expertise and pedagogical expertise. In my research the empirical data was mainly collected from the cadets during research interventions. Through reflection I will try to build a fruitful communication between the results of my study and vocational teachers' challenges in higher education. Guba and Lincoln (1998) have used the concept of transferability while discussing the trustworthiness of a qualitative research. Presently I'm working as a vocational teacher educator and it has been an extremely good opportunity to reflect the results of my research to my present job, especially to developing pedagogics in polytechnics and higher education. CHALLENGES FOR VOCATIONAL TEACHER'S EXPERTISE The officer's profession is a traditional profession of expertise and therefore I decided to explore the concept of expertise at the beginning on my action research process. While exploring the concept of expertise I used phenomenography (see Marton 1988 ; 1994) in analyzing the textual data derived from the open questionnaire of eight questions for cadets and officers. There were 21 cadets and 21 officers replying to this questionnaire (altogether 102 pages). The officers were mainly working as teachers for the cadets.Transferability of these results is obvious and these answers can easily be reflected to ordinary teacher's job in higher education - by contextualising the answers to each teacher's individual reality in the specific vocational field of expertise. The most important research result of the world of expertise was found in essays entitled "A Good Trainer" (122 respondents, altogether 217 pages of text). They were written by the first-year cadets. In the phenomenographic analysis I formulated 11 themes, e.g. :· The trainer's relationship to the trainee · The trainer's pedagogical knowledge · The good trainer's personal features · etc. Figure 1. The context for vocational teaching and learningIn producing this figure I have further developed the image of a good trainer in action which was presented in my dissertation. To this figure I have linked elements of the vocational teachers' challenges in higher education. So the focus for the teacher is to reflect and develop one's own practices, communication skills and abilities to meet students - constantly developing the pedagogical knowledge. Positive features of an expert will help to produce high quality teaching and help students' motivation and participation. Descriptors: action research, expertise, pedagogical expertise, teacher development