This symposium collects four papers that look at relevant dimensions of vocational education and training (VET) for international comparisons. Papers will include conceptual considerations as well as empirical findings from different countries (Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, the United Kingdom and the USA). Specific emphasis will be put on the concept of occupations (and related concepts such as vocation or profession) that is often neglected in comparative research on VET. Instead, recent comparisons have concentrated on the organisation of educational programmes and structures, the integration of general content into VET or mechanisms of systemic governance (e.g. Busemeyer &Trampusch, 2012, Nylund & Virolainen 2019 or Pilz 2016).

This type of governance research is, however, to a certain extent blind to questions that are directly focussing at other very relevant issues for educational research, such as the organization and practice of vocational teaching and learning in companies and schools or the subjective side of learning processes and its results. Whilst socio-cultural accounts of vocational and work-based learning and related concepts such as boundary crossing or the concept of tacit knowing have developed some significance in the international VET research discourse, they have only scarcely been tackled by comparative research. And this despite the fact that they constitute particularities that make VET distinct from general or academic education, and hence, are at the heart of vocational education (Cedefop 2017).

On the one hand, (comparative) VET research has to start from the assumption that it is different from other forms or programmes of education and therefore needs a common concept of “occupation” or “vocation”; on the other hand, the concept of occupation is questioned repeatedly. Some of the most important reasons for this are the discussion about the decreasing importance of occupations in life histories with quite different jobs, the decreasing importance of occupations in increasingly liberalized and flexible labour markets and the disappearance of entire occupations due to the rapid development of digital technologies.

The first contribution will introduce a framework that was developed in two Cedefop-Projects over the last six years and that is intended to provide a frame of reference for the comparison of VET-systems and concepts. It integrates three perspectives on VET: an educational system perspective, a socio-economic perspective and an epistemological-pedagogical perspective. In accordance with the three perspectives the symposium will include considerations from different disciplines and empirical fields of research and reflect on the significance of “occupation” as an important parameter of VET research. This includes sociological, educational and economic considerations. At the end of each contribution findings from all the contributions will be related to the framework.

The second contribution looks at the development of occupation as the reference system for VET in a Swiss-German comparison and relates it to overall developments in the vocational education and training systems of the two countries.

The third contribution represents a look at changes relevant to VET from the socio-economic perspective and is based on insights and theoretical concepts from a number of interviews that were carried out with eminent academic experts from different countries and disciplines in the relation between rapid technological changes and the way how work is organised.

The last paper will analyse the significance of the concept of “occupation” and “occupational practice” for the comparison of VET and how this integrates into the general framework. Specific emphasis will be laid upon the role of “occupation” and “occupational practice” as a “tertium comparationis” in comparative research.

Finally, a discussant advocating a psychological perspective on vocational education and "occupation" as a means of individual growth will round out the needed multidisciplinary view of “occupation” and VET.

Busemeyer, M.R. and Trampusch, C. (2012). The Comparative Political Economy of Collective Skill Formation. In: M. R. Busemeyer and C. Trampusch (eds). The Political Economy of Collective Skill Formation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3-38. Cedefop (2017). The changing nature and role of vocational education and training in Europe. Volume 1: Conceptions of vocational education and training: an analytical framework. Luxembourg: Publications Office. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2801/532605 Pilz, M. (2016). Typologies in Comparative Vocational Education: Existing Models and a New Approach. Vocations and Learning, 9(3), 295–314. Nylund, M., & Virolainen, M. (2019). Balancing ‘flexibility’ and ‘employability’: The changing role of general studies in the Finnish and Swedish VET curricula of the 1990s and 2010s. European Educational Research Journal, 18(3), 314–334. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904119830508