In Germany, vocational training plays a crucial role in the successful integration of refugees (Jeon, 2019). In the process of career choice, the formation of vocational aspirations is of particular importance (Rojewski, 2005). Adolescents may need to adapt their vocational aspirations to a largely competitive opportunity structure (Tomasik et al., 2009), as they must make their career decisions within the constraints of a segmented and predominantly market-oriented vocational education and training system (Protsch/Solga, 2016). Young refugees additionally face the challenge of developing occupational goals in a new social context, the existing opportunity structures of which are presumably still largely unfamiliar to them (Bergseng et al., 2019). The aim of this study is to examine the development of vocational aspirations among young refugees who migrated to Germany between 2014 and 2017.

We define occupational aspirations as an individual’s goals with regard to their future career (Rojewski, 2005). Occupational aspirations are formed already in childhood but remain relatively vague until early adolescence (Gottfredson, 1981). They become more concrete as educational and career decisions draw closer (Heckhausen/Tomasik, 2002), since adolescents increasingly engage with perceived opportunity structures during this phase (Gottfredson, 1981). The developmental process of occupational aspirations is influenced by various factors. Drawing on status attainment approaches (Sewell et al., 1969), we expect that higher parental occupational expectations lead to higher occupational aspirations among young refugees (H1). Furthermore, we expect young refugees in academic school tracks to develop higher occupational aspirations than those in non-academic tracks (H2) (Basler/Kriesi, 2019). In addition, we assume that anticipated discrimination in the training market negatively affects the development of occupational aspirations (H3) (Busse/Winkler, 2024).

For the analyses, we use Refugee Cohort 2 (RC2) of the study Refugees in the German Educational System (ReGES) (Will et al., 2021). At the time of sampling (October 2017), the refugee adolescents were between 14 and 16 years old and were still attending lower secondary education at the first measurement point. Our analyses refer to survey waves 1 (2017/2018, T1) and 4 (2019, T2) and include young refugees who were in grades 7 or 8 in wave 1 (n = 1,050). The dependent variable is the respondents’ realistic occupational aspiration (Rojewski, 2005). For the analyses, we use the International Socio-Economic Index of Occupational Status (ISEI) (Ganzeboom, 2010) corresponding to the aspired occupation. We estimate a cross-lagged structural equation model with imputed data (FIML).

Our results show that young refugees in grades 7 or 8 (T1) expect to enter occupations with comparatively high ISEI scores (e.g., Basler/Kriesi, 2019 for data on students without a refugee background) (M = 69.9; SD = 20.2). Over the observed period (on average 10 months), they lower their vocational aspirations by an average of 7 ISEI points (Δ = −7.51). The cross-lagged model (χ² = 3.07, df = 3, RMSEA = 0.02; CFI = 0.96) indicates systematic differences in the occupational aspirations of young refugees between the two measurement points. At T1, there is a significant association between perceived parental occupational expectations and the occupational aspirations of refugee students (β = 0.72, p < 0.001). The influence of perceived parental occupational expectations on students’ occupational aspirations decreases between T1 and T2 and is no longer statistically significant (β = 0.11, p = 0.077). We also find evidence for an effect of school track on the initial level of occupational aspirations at T1 (β = 4.00, p < 0.001). By contrast, there is no evidence for an effect of anticipated discrimination in the training market. Our findings highlight the high plasticity and dynamism of occupational aspirations among young refugees. They may suggest that young refugees’ orientations become decoupled from their own perceptions of parental occupational expectations and instead become more strongly aligned with the opportunity structures of the vocational education and training system. School tracks and the associated opportunities for training pathways substantially channel adolescents’ orientations.

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