In a European project with six countries, we research which factors support or challenge VET teachers’ daily work (Hoppe & Kaiser, 2020). Taking into account how complex and diverse the educational pathways are in Europe (Isacsson, Brevik, Struck, & Juan, 2021), the disparity of branches and levels of the programs involved in the study, and given the huge variety of traditions of vocational education and learning (Grollmann, 2008), these factors can be very different. More work-based learning and apprenticeships, more emphasis on key competences, new and more heterogeneous target groups and digitalisation are all putting more demands on teachers and trainers (Psifidou & Ranieri, 2020). A questionnaire was developed, in which we asked VET students, teachers, school leaders and teacher educators about the abilities needed to be a good vocational teacher (Kaiser & Lindberg 2019), and to what extent they are important in teacher’s daily work. We also wanted the group under study to answer open-ended questions about what causes trouble as a vocational teacher or what the respondents fear most? The practical implementation for collecting the empirical data material was carried out using the Questback tool (https://www.questback.com). This offers the opportunity to translate our questions and answer options into six different languages and get a complete dataset as a result. The analysis of the collected data material was divided into two sections where the quantitative part of the results was analysed using the software "SPSSStatistics". Since there is a big difference between the vocational education systems in the countries participating in the project (Isacsson et al., 2021), we also expect that these differences will appear in the study results. However, we also expect to see some similarities across countries, in that many professions are similar across national borders. Something that is interesting to cover whether vocational teachers see themselves as teachers (educators), professionals in the profession they are trained for, or a combination of these as the double field of practice (Brevik & Lier, 2013). We expect the disparities to be greatest among teacher education programs, as we have identified large differences in the educational requirements set in the various participating countries.

Brevik, B., & Lier, A. R. (2013). Technical and Vocational Teacher Education Practice: Profession or Semi Profession? Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of ATEE: Teacher Education Policies and Professionalisation, Eskisehir, Turkey. Grollmann, P. (2008). The Quality of Vocational Teachers: teacher education, institutional roles and professional reality. Educational Research Journal, , 7(4), 535-547. doi:https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2008.7.4.535 Hoppe, M. & Kaiser, F. (2021). Comparing vet teacher education at university level in five European countries. In C. Nägele, B.E. Stalder, & M. Weich (Eds.), Pathways in Vocational Education and Training and Lifelong Learning. Muttenz, Bern,(pp. 165–171). https://zenodo.org/record/4636423#.YHXkOOgzZyw Isacsson, A., Brevik, B., Struck, P., & Juan, A. P. (2021). The Limitations of European Comparative Studies in Vocational Education and Training. In C. Nägele, B.E. Stalder, & M. Weich (Eds.), Pathways in Vocational Education and Training and Lifelong Learning. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4603726 Kaiser, F. & Lindberg, V. (2019) Vocational teachers in the Swedish and Finnish vocational education systems. In F. Marhuenda & M.J. Chisvert-Tarazona (Eds.), Pedagogical concerns and market demands in VET. (pp.301-307), https://zenodo.org/record/2641712#.XmefL25Fxyw Psifidou, I., & Ranieri, A. (2020). Cooperación europea en la formación profesional: hacia una meta común. Revista Española De Educación Comparada(36), 32–53. doi:https://doi.org/10.5944/reec.36.2020.26879