Vocational education and training (VET) have been suffering from a shortage of teachers in many countries (Kalisch & Kaiser 2019; OECD 2021). The question arises how the qualification to become a VET teacher and the working conditions as well as work attractiveness of VET teachers can be improved.

A lot is known about the curricula and standards of VET teacher education and the different ways to become VET teacher in Europe (Hoppe & Kaiser 2021; Misra 2011) but we still have a lack of knowledge about the current working conditions of VET teachers and their needs for competencies.

To close this lack a reseach team form two German Universities with scientific backgrounds in work psychology and in Vocational education set up a study to analyse teachers at their workplaces in Mecklenburg-Western Pommerania in Germany in 2021 and 2022.

The aim of the analysis is to derive redesign proposals for working conditions and qualification opportunities for VET teachers. This contribution will report on the procedure, the theoretical background and the results of the work analysis.

More than twenty teachers at VET schools in different branches and programmes were observed and interviewed in a structured manner on the basis of content-based regular scales in a research-project founded by the national ministry in Germany in 2021. In addition interviews with school leaders took place and talks with other VET teachers in the same state to comment the main findings in 2022. The theoretical basis of the study is the theory of mental regulation of action (Hacker 1973; Volpert 1974) based on activity theory linked to Vygotsky, Leontjew and Galperin. The applied survey instrument TAG-MA was developed by Rau, Schweden, Hoppe und Hacker (2021). Different work characteristics, such as sequential completeness, degrees of freedom and the level of cognitive requirements, are assessed. In order to clarify the impressions and open questions with the workers, additional interviews took place after the workplace observations. In all of this, however, the quality of teaching or the actions of the teachers are not evaluated or judged from a pedagogical point of view. Rather, the work tasks and the shape of the conditions are evaluated against the background of stress and personality development. In the synopsis of the scales of disturbances and external interruptions, work peaks, work breaks, multitasking requirements and possibilities to hand over and take over tasks, which are graded under the minimum profile, there is a risk of too high work intensity, at least in phases. A real problem is the time of work peaks, especially during examination periods. These phases of work intensification go hand in hand with long working hours and the non-observance of rest periods and reduce the opportunities for recovery between work shifts. As a result, performance prerequisites can be impaired (Rau, 2017). In 2022, after the analysis of the first findings (Besser et.al. 2022), a further step of analysis took place in which active vocational school teachers at other schools in Mecklenburg-Western Pommerania were confronted with the findings. With the help of structural maps, they had to put the characteristics and competencies from the findings into a hierarchy and context and were able to assess their importance and relevance from their point of view. This might offer insights on the influence oft he branches and main vocational subject they teach.

First findings are published in an article in German 2022 (Besser et.al.). The lack of the opportunity to work with others reveals the discrepancy between the cooperation requirements that result from teaching and the prevailing individual (non-cooperative) way of teaching, planing and follow-up of lessons (Kremer, 2003). Neither teacher teamwork nor close cooperation with the training companies is an integral part of the work activity of VET teachers in Germany. Eder and Koschmann (2011) blame this circumstance on the lack of practical experience of VET teachers and the lack of organisational framework conditions. In addition to the potential restrictions on teaching quality, there is also the danger of social isolation (cf. DIN EN ISO 6385, 2016). The existing contradictions between the curricula concretised within the school and the examinations drawn up supra-regional with professional associations (including the Chamber of Industry and Commerce IHK, Chamber of Crafts) and training companies pose problems for the work of teachers in the vocational school. In contrast to the learning field orientation of the curricula, which are aligned towards holism, process orientation and procedural knowledge, in the examination mostly declarative knowledge questions with a high level of detail are asked (Berben, 2014). Intrinsic learning opportunities can be increased among teachers not only by improving feedback but also by increasing the degrees of temporal freedom. Thus, 90-minute teaching units should be the norm. Research shows that longer teaching units are associated with a greater didactic variety and that more learning processes can be completed (Wackermann & Hater, 2016). The observed didactic diversity is likely to be the result of the increase in the degrees of freedom in terms of content that arise as a consequence of the increase in the degrees of freedom in terms of time through longer (90-minute) teaching units.

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