International Journal for Research in Vocational Education and Training
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Book Review: India. International Handbook of Vocational Education and Training
Full text linkThe book is based on the authors’ work for over a decade in India in the field of vocational education and training (VET). 
Exploring visual languages across vocational professions
Full text linkContext: Discovering visual languages across professions is a complex task since it entails discovering a communication system composed of information in image or textual form called representations and also including various kinds of annotations such as notes. Such a task has been previously scarcely considered within research, and basically only investigating in white collar professions (e.g., doctors). This leaves us wondering about all the possible shapes of these vocational visual languages and the potential of using these images to foster learning. For this reason, the current research aims to investigate commonalities and differences of visual languages across vocational professions with the goal of using the outcomes to design educational activities for vocational education and training (VET).
Approach: 55 semi-structured interviews have been conducted within eleven professions from the areas of Craftsmanship, Industry, Health and Services such a plumber and fashion designers. The interviews were audio-recorded and analyzed with NVivo through a coding scheme which served as the main reference for the analysis.
Findings: Results showed that, in terms of visual representations, professionals use different types of drawings such as technical drawings (e.g., woodworkers), evaluation forms (e.g., dental assistants) and illustrations (e.g., gardeners). For sketches, participants indicate the practice of creating sketches depicting objects to produce (e.g. goldsmiths). For photos, they portrayed things to remember or pay attention to (e.g., chemical technologists). Participants across professions use annotations such as notes to specify details of their job. On the other side, they also report profession-specific annotations such as mathematical symbols like the surface roughness (e.g., polymechanics) and diagrammatic elements like different type of lines to indicate the status of the bones and muscles (e.g., massage therapists) or where to cut textiles (e.g., fashion designers). In terms of communalities, participants within technical professions indicated a shared use of both representations and annotations. Conversely, other professions had very specific visual languages hardly shareable across professions.
Conclusion: These results helped in discovering the visual languages of different professions and this knowledge will be used to implement educational activities based on specific skills needed in different professions such as observation skills with the use of VET-specific educational technologies. 
Critical Practice Study of Nursing Evaluated by Teachers
Full text linkPurpose: Competent nursing care is essential to positive patient outcomes and quality patient care. Graduate nurses begin practice as novices in knowledge and experience often entering an environment where patients have several disease processes complicating their care. A strong foundation of educational competencies prior to entering practice is vital for the development and growth of graduate nurses into the role of RN. The purpose of this study was to examine the use of the Nurse Competence Scale among nursing faculty.Method: Nursing faculty were surveyed to determine which competencies were a priority in nursing practice. The Nurse Competence Scale was used to identify and categorize nurse competences. Brenner’s novice to expert theoretical framework was used to apply findings to curricular programs. IRB approval was granted from each educational institution. SPSS statistical analysis was used to analyze survey results.Results: Among the categories of the Nurse Competence Scale, nursing faculty identified Acting appropriately in life-threatening situations in the Managing Situations section as most important to practice. In the category of Helping, Planning patient care according to individual needs was identified as most important. Additionally the nursing faculty surveyed rated Contributing to further development of multidisciplinary clinical paths in the Therapeutic Interventions category as the lowest.Conclusion: This study contributes to the discussion on nursing competence. Priorities for nursing faculty aligned with register nurses in practice. This study helps pair nursing education with practice in several ways including aligning current practice with education. Nurse Educators may use these findings to help join curricular outcomes with practice. Evaluating each item on the Nurse Competence Scale using the critical to practice scale provides insight to the necessary skills and knowledge needed to be competent in nursing. In addition the results may be compared to current practice guidelines to ensure best practice. Further research linking education and practice using nursing competence is needed
Decision-Making Processes Among Potential Dropouts in Vocational Education and Training and Adult Learning
Full text linkContext: Aiming at gaining knowledge about students\u27 thoughts and actions in deciding to stay in or drop out of an educational programme, an empirical study was conducted on dropout among 18-24-year-old students in VET and basic general adult learning. Approach: In order to pursue this aim, the study combined two sets of data: weekly student surveys and interviews with these same students. While the surveys provide a weekly snapshot of the students\u27 thoughts regarding the probability of them continuing in the programme, their satisfaction with the educational programme as a whole, the specific lessons they attend, and the atmosphere at the school, the interviews contribute with detailed descriptions of the students\u27 thoughts on the same matters.Findings: Based on the students\u27 answers over an eight-week period, it was possible to trace a graph illustrating changes in the students\u27 attitudes. These graphs can be placed within four categories of development: the stable, the positive, the unstable, and the negative. The latter can furthermore be differentiated as reflecting a stable decline, a fluctuating decline, or a sudden decline. In the interviews, the aim was to elicit the individual students\u27 thoughts and actions at the points when their graphs took a turn. Conclusions: The findings show that the students\u27 thoughts and actions concern matters both inside and outside the school. Furthermore, seemingly trivial matters in the students\u27 lives are shown to have a potentially decisive influence on the students\u27 thoughts about staying in or dropping out of a programme. These findings confirm the importance of focusing on students\u27 decision-making processes in research on dropout. However, further research is needed to increase understanding of processes leading to decisions to drop out of education, including the qualification of methods to capture these processes
Crossing Boundaries: VET, the Labour Market and Social Justice
Full text linkPurpose: The paper explores the relationship between vocational education and training (VET), the labour market and social justice in the current conjuncture.Approach: The paper adopts an approach rooted in critical policy analysis. It consequently sets the discussion within the wider socio-economic and political context. Such an approach enables an exploration of the changing nature of waged labour in current conditions.Results: A critical policy analysis facilitates a discussion of the labour process, waged labour and its intensification. At the same time these processes are allied to the effective expulsion and marginalisation of particular groups of workers from employment. Importantly, such processes need to be placed in their localised and spatial context within particular social formations.Conclusion: Equity models of social justice that emphasise equal opportunities, are restrictive and can be contrasted with equality models which have a more expansive and philosophically rooted understanding of justice. The paper through its examination of the salience of VET in the current conjuncture as well as its significance for a post austerity democratic and radical politics, argues for a relational analysis that seeks to interrupt the patterns of inequality precipitated by neo-liberalism
Professional Desires and Career Decisions: Effects of Professional Interests, Role Models, and Internship in Lower Secondary School
Full text linkContext: Following the social cognitive career theory of Lent, Brown, and Hackett (1994), the current study examines the effect of role models’ professions and practical internship experiences on the choice of professional environment independent of professional interests. Embedded in the Swiss context with its strong vocational training system, the paper outlines to what extent the desired professional environment is realized in the chosen apprenticeship two years later and how this realization can be predicted. The theoretical model proposes that students form direct professional experiences during their first internship(s). If those experiences are positive, students choose an apprenticeship in the same professional environment. Students have indirect (vicarious) professional experiences through their role models. If those experiences are positive, students choose an apprenticeship in the role model’s professional environment. The study examined whether, independent of professional interests, direct experiences in internships and indirect experiences through role models’ professions predict the realization of a desired professional environment in an apprenticeship.Method: The longitudinal sample consists of N = 348 seventh- and ninth-grade students from four German-speaking Swiss cantons. Professional interests and environments were measured using standardized questionnaires. The professional environments of the desired professions, the chosen apprenticeships, the role model’s professions, and the internship’s professions were coded using Holland’s (1997) interest types: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional (RIASEC).Results: In 53% of the cases, students chose an apprenticeship in the professional environment they desired. In 53% of the cases, the chosen professional environment corresponded with the professional environment of the student’s two most important role models. In 39% of the cases, those role models were their parents. By means of logistic regression analyses, we can show that role models’ professional environments and the professional environment of the first internship influenced the realization of the desired professional environment at the end of lower secondary school, independent of the effect of the individuals’ interests.Conclusions: Results show that direct professional experiences in internships and indirect experiences of role models influence the realization of the desired professional environment, independent of professional interests. In a contextual approach, career counselling should include the role model’s profession and how it corresponds with the client’s interests and professional desires. Moreover, role models, especially parents, have a responsibility to reflect on how their goals influence students’ career choice processes
Book Review: Collective Skill Formation in Liberal Market Economies? The Politics of Training Reforms in Australia, Ireland and the United Kingdom
Full text linkThe book was published as the 16th volume of the series Studies in Vocational and Continuing Education. Series Editors-in-Chief are Philipp Gonon and Anja Heikkinen. Janis Vossiek is a post-doctoral researcher at the School of Educational and Cultural Studies of the University of Osnabrück, Germany
The `Future of Employment` on the Shop Floor: Why Production Jobs are Less Susceptible to Computerization than Assumed
Full text linkContext: Germany is seen as one of the major players in developing what is known as “Industry 4.0.” Especially in the manufacturing and the automotive sector, the vocational training is seen as a precondition and consequence alike for the global success of these sectors. Current research though characterizes production work, especially machine-related tasks, as dull routine work and therefore of high probability of computerization.Approach: Based on qualitative research perspectives and sociological results that reveal the importance of experience and implicit capabilities, this study quantifies what is mostly seen as “non-routine” work. To measure these dimensions of living labouring capacity, an index is introduced that is developed from 18 items of one of the biggest German task-based, representative surveys.Findings: The contribution challenges the widespread prognosis that production workers face high susceptibility. Comparing data on non-routine share in production and of vocational trained workers with those of Frey and Osborne, the findings stress the mostly neglected importance of non-routine work, even in production and especially with vocational trained, machine-related occupations.Conclusion: The results draw on how much more employees on the shop floor are apt to handle change, complexity, and imponderabilities than often assumed. If their work will or will not be susceptible to novel approaches in robotics or algorithms, therefore, is not a question of routine
Social Dimensions and Participation in Vocational Education and Training - An Introduction in the Special Issue
Full text linkThis is the introduction of the IJRVET\u27s special edition in 2018 "Social Dimension and Participation in VET-System"
The Prediction of Professional Success in Apprenticeship: The Role of Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Abilities, of Interests and Personality
Full text linkContext: We addressed the issue of person-job-fit by focussing on both professional success and work satisfaction. Publications studying the predictive validity of (cognitive) ability, personality, or vocational interest alone have shown relationships with professional success or work satisfaction for each predictor separately. Nevertheless, these predictors have rarely been studied simultaneously. Methods: To this end we tested the incremental validity of abilities, traits, and interests in a sample from diverse occupations: In 648 apprentices and students from five different branches (Food, Tech, People, Office, Craft) the (incremental) contributions of 3 intelligence factors (verbal, numerical, spatial), 3 alternative abilities (social-emotional, creative, practical), 4 conscientiousness facets, other big five factors (O, E, A, N), and of 14 professional interests were analysed regarding prediction of GPA in professional schools and school/job satisfaction. Results: Intelligence and conscientiousness were best predictors, followed by social-emotional competence and interests, whereas other traits provided marginal contributions. Predictors varied between branches, mostly following expectations. The test battery allowed a very good prediction of apprenticeship success (max. 37%), but for some branches prediction was considerably lower.Conclusion: Criteria for person-job-fit are not swappable, neither are the predictors. Professional success was mostly predicted by a different predictor set -namely ability and the personality dimension of conscientiousness- then satisfaction, which was mostly predicted by non-interest in a certain occupation. As a practical implication, we conclude that choosing the right candidate for a certain branch one needs to use a broad set of predictor variables. Besides cognitive ability also personality and vocational interests had predictive validity for an individuals person-job-fit