This paper discusses Finnish vocational upper secondary students’ and graduates’ perceptions and experiences on working life transition(s) in the context of changed adulthood and labour market. It is interested in the changed demands of the labour market that make young adults’ working life transitions more complex than before: scholars (e.g., Sennett 1998; Beck 1992) have claimed that the contemporary market-driven labour market has transformed to be more uncertain, increasingly demanding self-reflexivity, flexibility, responsibility, and efficiency especially from young adults who are starting their working life paths (Kelly 2006). Youth researchers have pointed out how young adults struggle with the expectations of education and employment policies because these policies rely on a very narrow ideal of working life transitions at the same time, when the promises of their education do not meet with the realities of labour market and adulthood they face after graduation (Wyn et al. 2020). In this context, vocational upper secondary education’s aim to improve young people’s employability skills and to educate future worker-citizens is particularly interesting, especially if vocational students learn during their education to interpret their value in society through worker-citizenship (Isopahkala et al. 2014; cf. Farrugia 2021). This paper will discuss with two qualitative datasets, how young adults studying in vocational education (12 group interviews) or who have graduated from vocational education (interviews with 21 young adults) perceive worker-citizenship and how they negotiate with worker-citizen ideal, maintained by vocational education, within the contemporary Finnish labour market (see Author 2021, 2023). The paper will illustrate the importance of worker-citizenship for these young adults as a position that improves their sense of belonging to the work community and society and enables them the adult and independent life they aspire for. However, it will also illustrate how, in line with claims in youth research, some of them struggle when their aspirations, life situations, work experiences and actual chances to do work-related choices do not fit with the worker-citizen ideal. From these perspectives, it ponders vocational education’s worker-citizen ideal in relation to the possibilities of these young adults to feel valuable in society and to make choices that support their life situations and well-being in the contemporary labour market from the perspective of Nussbaum’s (2013) ‘human dignity’. It will show how shaping worker-citizenship is inherent part of vocational graduates’ contemporary adulthood and points out vocational education’s role in supporting these young adults’ senses of societal belonging (see May 2011).

Beck, U (1992) Risk Society. Towards a New Modernity. London: SAGE Publications. Farrugia, D (2021) Youth, Work and the Post-Fordist Self. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Isopahkala-Bouret, U et al. (2014) Educating worker-citizens: visions and divisions in curriculum texts. Journal of education and work 27(1), 92–109. Kelly, P (2006) The entrepreneurial self and ‘youth at-risk’: exploring the horizons of identity in the twenty-first century. Journal of Youth Studies 9(1), 17–32. May, V (2011) Self, Belonging and Social Change. Sociology 45(3), 363–378. Nussbaum, M (2013) Creating Capabilities. The Human Development Approach. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Sennett, R (1998) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Wyn, J et al. (2020, eds.) Youth and the New Adulthood: Generations of Change. Singapore: Springer Singapore Pty. Ltd.