Recent developments in working life have challenged not only work organisations but also educational institutions to develop new ways of ensuring that the level of competence of the workforce meets the requirements of the changing world of work. Therefore, vocational education and training (VET) is increasingly being shifted to the workplace, which is expected to provide vocational students with powerful learning and vocational development environments. In order to promote effective pedagogical practices for work-based learning, we need to understand better how students’ learning and vocational development at work can be supported. In this study, students’ learning at work will be examined as an acquisition of skills and knowledge at work, and their vocational development at work with the help of the concept of vocational identity (see e.g. Eteläpelto, 2007). Learning and vocational identity development (at work) has been often examined either from the individual cognitive perspective or from the social situated perspective. These views has been seen the opposite to each other: the cognitive perspective has been seen to neglect processes of social interaction (because it emphasises individual development in acquisition of intellectual skills) whereas the situative perspective has been seen to accord too little importance to individuals (because it emphasises participation in social practice) (e.g. Hodkinson et al., 2008; Anderson et al., 2000). When we search for the factors which promote students’ learning and vocational identity development at work, we will pay attention to both above-mentioned perspectives (i.e. student-related individual factors and learning situation). In this study, the learning situation is understood as the social, institutional and structural features of students’ workplaces, but also as their educational practices (that is, such practices which endeavour to integrate to each other learning that takes place at school and at work).

The data from the students (N = 3106) was collected with Internet questionnaires. The subjects of the study were all final year students of two large VET providers from six fields of Finnish VET, and their average age was 21.35. The data were analysed using regression analysis (a linear regression analysis, stepwise).

Preliminary findings show that students’ learning and vocational development at work depends on all three factors: the factors related to the students (i.e. their motivational orientations), the factors related to the circumstances of the workplace (i.e. their active membership in the work community), and also the factors related to the educational practices (i.e. integration between school learning and workplace learning). Thus, the students’ learning or vocational development at work cannot be seen as only a consequence of students’ motivation, as often is believed, but the circumstances of the workplace and also the educational practices (especially the connection between school-based learning and work-based learning) were equally important for students’ learning and vocational development at work.