Since 1989, the Czech Republic has experienced a process of radical social and economic change. The transformation of the totalitarian political and social structures and of the state-controlled national economy into democratic society has necessarily led to a transformation of the whole domain of lifelong learning and adult education, too. The fact that this happened at the very peak of the transformation from industrial society to knowledge society in Europe and in the period of intensifying globalisation has added to the complexity and difficulty of the transformation. Adult vocational education and training is a very important, quantitatively growing component of lifelong learning. The occupational and vocational context is a key factor determining motivation for and participation in adult education in the Czech Republic. It is unfortunately the case that the written discourse on these issues often suffers from a lack of information, which limits the interpretation potential. Much important information is missing. The paper is based on hypothesis that the whole area of adult vocational education and training experience second tranformation in the Czech Republic. The first trasformation was economic one: The traditionally strong system of company training, which was perceived as an important component of the national economy in the era of communist political control, more or less fell apart during the period of economic restructuring. Companies were giving up, one by one, their in-house training centres as something they were able to do without as a part of the process of making its operation more cost-efficient. Until now company education and training dominated by outsourcing. The aim of the paper is to explore all available data in order to illuminate the (probably existing) second tranformation of adult VET. The rediscovery and kvantitative growth of the in-company training since the begin of the new century was the first step of the second tranformation. A qualitative change may be observed too. Pol et al. (2006), Novotný (2008) and Šimberová (2008) -- using sources (mainly journals, online sources and volumes of workshop and conference proceedings) targeting authors and readers from among managers and human resources managers -- has opened the discussion on new approaches to VET. The new discourse concentrates on presenting the various options how human resources development can be perceived from other perspective apart from mainstream company education and training outside the workplace. This shift might be interpreted also as the change or learning cultures in companies.

Analysis of relevant programatic and analytical documents (by government, ministries of education and labour and their expert institutions – see list of references, part 2), meta-analysis of research realized in past decade (by National Training Fund, Czech Statistical Office -- ibid) as well as findings of an empirical study (Adult learning survey, 2005) undertaken by author and colleagues are used in the paper.

Conclusions are devided into two parts. 1. The hypothese on “second trasformation” is discussed. 2. The evidence of the existing tensions and paradoxes associated with adult VET is presented. Some tensions are obviously generated at the level of educational policies of the Czech Republic, where problems which have accumulated in the system are dealt with slowly and sometimes even in a rather random fashion depending on EU policies of potential financing possibilities.