Recent research has increasingly explored instructional quality in shaping Vocational Education and Training (VET) outcomes. However, how instructional quality in company-based training influences vocational competence development remains unclear, particularly regarding its dynamic effects at different training stages. This study examines how training quality criteria and individual trainee characteristics influence the development of general and domain-specific competence over two years of VET. The study followed 458 commercial trainees throughout their VET program. Training quality was assessed via questionnaires, and competence was measured using validated tests at three points: program start, midpoint, and end. Latent Growth Modeling (LGM) was used to analyze growth trajectories, incorporating time-invariant (e.g., prior education) and time-varying predictors (e.g., feedback). Four training quality criteria (task relevance, autonomy, feedback, school-company cooperation) and four individual characteristics (age, prior education, literacy interest, desired occupation) significantly fostered competence development, albeit at varying stages. The findings emphasize the dynamic nature and varying impact of training quality on competence development and the critical importance of tailoring strategies to specific competence dimensions and training phases. Adopting a nuanced, adaptive approach to training design can significantly enhance outcomes in VET contexts. This requires accounting for individual characteristics, comprehensively addressing various aspects of training quality, and distinguishing clearly between different types of competence.

Second career teachers (SCT) are key role models in vocational education (VE) because they prepare students for the vocational practice they were part of, and they bring up-to-date vocational knowledge and skills into VE schools. Therefore, the early leaving of SCTs in VE is a problem, adding to the worldwide teacher shortages. Induction programs have been developed to support starting teachers to grow into their new profession and to diminish high attrition rates. However, it is argued that current induction programs fail to support SCTs adequately. For instance, induction programs rarely adapt to SCTs' various needs, such as recognizing and integrating previously developed competencies and specific backgrounds. Furthermore, SCTs’ induction programs in the specific context of VE are largely understudied. This study explores the experiences of SCTs in VE during their induction programs regarding four themes identified in research on SCTs in other education sectors: 1) professional identity development, 2) learning processes, 3) tailor-made coaching, and 4) co-creation of induction programs. Eleven SCTs from eight Dutch VE schools were interviewed. The data show a rich variation of SCTs’ experiences. For example, they experienced the opportunity to develop their professional identity as teachers while preserving and including their former identity as practitioners of the vocation they teach for. Yet, only a few SCTs experienced co-creation of the induction program, which seems to have a positive impact. The insights of this study offer an understanding of what SCTs in VE go through and what might support them during their induction.

This article investigates how participants in simulations of extreme events handle inadequacy, contributing to the discussion on workplace learning in high-pressure and unpredictable scenarios. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted across five simulations in three organizations (military, police, and county administrative board), involving 288 h of observations, ethnographic interviews, and 18 semi-structured interviews. The analysis focused on identifying episodes where participants encountered inadequacy, exploring how they recognized, attributed, and addressed it. Our findings reveal that inadequacy disrupts routine practices but also fosters opportunities for learning and innovation. Key conditions for effectively handling inadequacy include the voicing of inadequacy, which requires psychologically safe environments, and proactive responses such as improvisation or acceptance under urgency. Additionally, simulations, while controlled and artificial, effectively expose inadequacies, revealing gaps in preparedness that can inform future crisis responses. This article contributes to professional learning by highlighting inadequacy as a critical factor in both individual and collective learning, offering insights into how simulations can be designed to enhance preparedness for unpredictable, high-stakes events.

In vocational education and training, it can be assumed that the digital transformation increases the relevance of individuals’ cross-occupational collaboration competency (COCC) across vocational and professional sectors, thus improving and reorganizing processes across time and domains on the basis of available information. This poses a challenge to instruction and diagnostics in VET, which can be supported by thorough, empirically grounded theoretical modeling. In Striković and Wittmann (2022), we suggested a role-theoretical approach to modeling COCC involving five role-theoretical dimensions: knowing one’s own occupational role, knowing the occupational role of one’s collaboration partners, latent processes of role distance, role-taking, and object-oriented role coordination. In the present study, we evaluate this role-theoretical model empirically using the example of nursing, specifying and operationalizing the model with a computer-based situational judgment test and using a data set of 328 nursing students to carry out an in-depth analysis of (1) dimensionality and (2) role-related task features thought to influence item difficulty. While model comparisons showed the superiority of a unidimensional vector compared to five- and two-dimensional structures, linear additive regression analysis revealed that the role-related task features on the basis of the five dimensions showed significant effects, as did the number of collaboration partners and the test subjects’ subject-matter competence, which can also be linked to the nurses’ situational role. These findings are in line with our theoretical reasoning in the COCC model. We discuss their limitations as well as their theoretical and educational significance, outlining needs for further research—also in other professional and vocational domains.

The purpose of this article is to introduce a design-based research (DBR) approach developed in the field of vocational and continuing education, which is grounded in a pragmatic and phenomenologically inspired enactivist approach to activity. As a design-based methodology, our activity-centered and enactive DBR approach aims to generate knowledge related to design and to identify relevant design principles. After detailing the particularities of an activity-centered and enactive DBR approach, we focus on the results pertaining to design knowledge by identifying two broad design principles for vocational education and training, and five enactivist inspired principles for training design. A significant practical implication for researchers and practitioners in vocational and continuing education and training is that these enactivist inspired design principles provide promising pathways to enhance the connectivity between (i) work experiences, (ii) work and training practices, and (iii) learning contexts.

Collaboration between schools and enterprises in vocational education and training (VET) is a challenge in many countries, Norway included. There is a tendency to organise VET in separate theoretical and practical learning arenas that lack mutual coherence. This article presents the findings of a four-year action research study in which 30 vocational teachers, who were taking an in-service master’s degree programme in vocational pedagogy, completed systematic research-based projects on developing partnerships between schools and enterprises in the school-based part of Norwegian VET. The goal was to strengthen the relevance of vocational education by creating stronger links between the content of the education and the content of the vocation. The study was based on a pragmatic, holistic perspective on vocational competence and education where essential, authentic vocational tasks to which theory is related are regarded as the core educational content, both in the enterprises and in schools. The findings are based on an analysis of 30 master’s degree theses documenting each of the teachers’ development projects.The results show examples of and principles for how collaboration between schools and enterprises can be organised around vocational tasks. Core principles include formal agreements on collaboration between schools and enterprises, regular dialogues between vocational teachers, instructors and students about educational tasks and content, joint planning and follow-up of students’ placements in enterprises, and exchanges of experience and competence between teachers and instructors. The results show that, according to students, instructors and vocational teachers, the application of such principles contributed to vocational relevance and students’ motivation and learning outcomes.

Pupils’ and students’ learning in the workplace and dual education has drawn increased attention because it is, among others, relevant in combating youth unemployment, increasing individual employability, and organisations’ ability to provide high quality services and products. However, research focusing on pupils’ and students’ readiness to participate in learning in the workplace is scarce and scattered. The present study was conducted to get a deeper insight into readiness to participate in learning in the workplace, and more particular in the Flemish (Belgium) context of dual education. The study applied a multi-method approach including literature review, document study, semi-structured interviews and member checking. The study resulted in a conceptualisation of ‘willingness to participate in learning in the workplace’ and ‘maturity for learning in the workplace’ including clusters of competencies related to participation in the workplace, learning in the workplace, and motivation for learning and participating in the workplace. This conceptualisation contributes to the development of policy and practice through providing a basis for assessing readiness to participate in dual education.

This study’s aim is to examine vocational students’ perceptions of self-regulated learning in work-based settings regarding Finnish vocational education and training (VET). We examined the participants’ self-reported thoughts and experiences of VET learning and vocational development that were reflected against SRL theory. The interview data (N = 33) included apprentices (n = 15) in work-based and students in school-based VET (n = 18) in the fields of social and healthcare, business and administration, and construction. Overall, the results indicated that learning at work promoted vocational students’ cognitive engagement and motivation. The interviews also introduced certain SRL strategies that guided the participants’ efforts to learn. In particular, many of the vocational students had taken the initiative to set goals, done strategic planning, and monitored their own performance jointly with their teachers or co-workers. However, the self-reports also revealed some shortcomings in the students’ SRL behaviour. The importance and availability of social support and positive feedback from VET teachers and workplace trainers/co-workers to vocational students’ learning and self-efficacy were underlined in the self-reports.

This article reports a study illustrating the relationship between digitalization and professional development from an identity-centered perspective. Drawing on a unique data set of 101 empathy-based stories from 81 Finnish government workers, the findings show how workers might experience and respond to work-identity alignments and misalignments in a digitalized working life and how this might influence their professional development. We identify four typifications—the thriving developer, the loyal transformer, the stagnant self-doubter, and the career crafter— and illustrate how digitalization can either support or hinder professional development by inducing work-identity (mis)alignments and how workers may respond to these in different ways by engaging in identity work and job crafting. In particular, our findings emphasize the role professional identity and agency play in professional development and highlight the importance of recognizing how digitalization of work can threaten or support workers’ professional identities to build a supportive working environment where the workers feel like they are valued and able to develop in a meaningful way.