16 Vocational education and training and transitions into the labor market

Abstract

Stage 6 of the German National Educational Panel Study is devoted to youth’s transitions from school into the labor market. In all Western societies, vocational education and training (VET) systems face a number of challenges, including the need to adapt to increasing skill requirements across the economy and handle the danger of producing an “underclass” of low-skilled youth. This chapter presents the life-course approach for investigating school-leavers’ pathways from school into the labor market within the National Educational Panel Study. Several factors shape young people’s school-to-work transitions: their motivation and competence endowment, their decisions concerning further course of education, the constraints they face both concerning opportunities for VET and gatekeepers’ recruitment behavior, the information and support youths may or may not receive from social networks, and the learning environments they encounter in firms and schools. We shall outline the basic theories that will guide our research concerning these influences and discuss how they are taken into account within stage 6 of the National Educational Panel Study. Thus, we will give a picture of the study’s research potential in the area of VET.