Vocational education and training (VET) is expected to equip young people and workers with skills that allow them to play an active role in the labour market (‘employability‘) or/and to access further learning. To what extent this objective is achieved is a crucial indicator of the quality of a VET system or of individual VET providers. A better understanding of the performance of VET graduates in the labour market is also one of the key sources for assessing and improving the labour market relevance of VET, alongside other methodologies like forecasts of skills supply and demand (Cedefop 2013a). Relevant information on the status of VET graduates can be obtained by ‘tracking graduates‘, i.e. through collecting quantitative and/or qualitative information about the situation of former students after completing their VET programme. Such VET graduate tracking measures may also be an important source of information for career guidance services.
The topic of VET graduate tracking has been taken up at European level and several policies and measures refer to VET graduate tracking in Member States:
- In 2009, the EQAVET Framework introduced two indicators related to VET graduate tracking;
- The 2015 Riga conclusion refers to the establishment of continuous information and feedback in VET in line with the EQAVET recommendation;
- The New Skills Agenda for Europe (2016) calls for the development of Member States’ systems for large-scale tracking of VET graduates;
- A proposal for a Council Recommendation on graduate tracking (VET and higher education) was issued in 2017.
Most European countries have established structures for collecting some kind of statistical and other data on the status of VET graduates (i.e. from labour force surveys or administrative data) or have set up more specific measures to track VET graduates. How such practices and measures are set-up is implicitly or explicitly informed by the underlying idea of the purpose of education or more specifically VET. In this regard, Hordosy 2014 distinguishes between three perspectives, namely the sociological, the humanistic and the economic - human capital theory – model. From a sociological perspective education is perceived as common good and therefore it is of interest “how the ‘group’ gaining education benefits or deteriorates the wider society”. Hence, tracking of VET graduates following a sociological model would focus on the implications of education on social mobility or social stratification (Hordosy 2014, p. 451). The humanistic model on the other hand focuses on the individual and education is perceived as becoming a fulfilled person through personal development. Tracking measures following this theoretical strand would ask about the extent and process of personal fulfilment (ibid.). Finally, the economic model seizes education as investment which “generates a stream of future benefits for the individual as higher earnings” From this viewpoint “questions around the returns of education” are central (ibid.).
However, an overview on why and how practices and measures for tracking VET graduates are established and their specific characteristics or their comparability is still missing. Furthermore, research on tracer studies often focuses on higher education (e.g. Gaebel 2012) or has a rather broad scope (e.g. secondary and tertiary education – Hordosy 2014).
Thus, this paper addresses the following questions:
- Which European countries have systematic VET graduate tracking measures established at national level?
- What are the differences and commonalities of these measures?
- What are the opportunities for making the schemes more comparable and systematic across the Member States?
