Diversity instead of competition and displacement

Despite successful modernisation of the vocational education and training (VET) system over the last decade, once again the academic discourse about the effectiveness and sustainability of VET has intensified.

This debate is prompted on the one hand by the higher competence requirements imposed by the expanding knowledge and service economy and, on the other hand, by a perception of graduates with Bachelor's degrees that also confer a professional qualification as potential new competitors for the same jobs as vocationally qualified skilled workers.

So far, however, empirical VET research has found little evidence to support the thesis of any erosion of the middle-grade qualification tier or consequences for the VET system. Quite the opposite: in the field of knowledge-based services, complementary development of middle-grade and high-qualified employment can be observed.

An ongoing BIBB study on meeting company qualification needs aims to contribute to the establishment of firmer empirical foundations in this area. It looks not only at the classic areas of company-based IVET, CVET and competence-development activities, but also at that of staff recruitment. Some preliminary findings are now available, which are based on an expert survey of company and sector representatives. It took the form of 25 semi-structured interviews with ten industry spokespeople and 15 representatives of small, medium and large companies from eleven sectors in which employment expanded in the years 2003 to 2007.

The views of sector and company representatives as expressed in the interviews shed some interesting light on the research rationales mentioned in the introduction. Without wishing to pre-empt particular findings, the following analysis is prefaced with the remark that, judging from the responses of the experts questioned, the trend towards more academically qualified staff and the possibility of repercussions for skilled workers with vocational qualifications is a non-issue; in contrast, the crucial question for the experts is how they can use a company-based socialisation strategy to develop qualified skilled workers from the very start, and to retain them in the medium to long term. The requisite competence profiles call for a combination of demanding standards of specialised systematic knowledge and understanding, along with strong experience-based knowledge and practical know-how relevant to the given occupation.

Those interviewed discuss the need to develop extended competences, which they bundle - for the most part separately from the required occupation-specific skills - into a range of "generic" competences or key qualifications for the workplace. While process- and customer-orientation and the associated communication skills as well as systematic thinking and the ability for self-organisation are expected at almost all levels of work, the job profiles that are filled with university graduates are associated with heightened requirements.

Some of those cited are greater systematic knowledge and meta-cognitive competences as well as management skills. The requirements upon employees seem to be rising at all levels in equal measure. In their responses, there is no discernible indication that work profiles are being carved up to create scaled-down roles for the low qualified, on the one hand, and more demanding work profiles for the highly qualified, on the other. In fact, in certain areas where many older unskilled workers are employed - such as the transport industry, for example - companies seem to be systematically endeavouring to replace them with vocationally qualified staff as they retire.

In the view of one company representative, the still very new occupation of the "Skilled Transport Employee" offers ideal conditions for future drivers to gain such a broad qualification from the outset that it will not only avert the known problem of incapacity for driving work after 25 years of service, but will at the same time impart the team- and service-orientation that is increasingly demanded in all workplaces nowadays. Because of their hybrid qualification, it will also be possible to deploy these employees in sales, public relations and vehicle servicing roles; in this way they are responding effectively to the massive shift in roles within the sector.

Since the image of the sector is not rated as very appealing, all the more is invested in high-quality IVET and CVET in order to retain people within the company and assure them of long-term prospects. Across all the sectors, in-company IVET is functioning as an important retention strategy from the very outset.

Apart from this, companies appreciate the ability to exert an influence on "what the young people learn", whereas they criticise purely university-based training programmes for their lack of relevance to practice.

In general, as the above example from the transport industry shows, those surveyed advocated a type of IVET that is not too rigid in its content but imparts a solid foundation in the specialist domain of the company's core business. In particular, the flexibility resulting from a broad occupational profile enables companies to bolt on the required specialisations successively as the need arises, while at the same time giving young people time to identify their own personal preferences more precisely before they join the firm permanently as skilled workers.
In the industrial-technical sector, companies reap the benefits of their highly qualified skilled workers, many of whom will stick with tradition by following up their journeyman's certificate, sooner or later, with a Master Craftsman's or Technician's examination, even if there is no immediate prospect of a job at the appropriate level. Master Craftsman positions are usually filled internally, for this function is closely dependent on precise knowledge of the company's internal procedures and products and specific leadership competencies within the team.

Technicians, on the other hand, could possibly find themselves in competition with holders of the new Bachelor degrees because of the nature of their work, which predominantly consists of theoretical and planning tasks.

The interviewees' responses make it clear that nuanced assessments regarding the qualification demands for the different job levels and fields already exist within companies, and they care about deploying their staff appropriately. Apart from achieving an efficient distribution of salary grades, they very much seek to offer employees the right degree of personal challenge. In order to have a good "qualification mix that addresses the mix of competence requirements", in the words of a spokesman from the IT sector, companies pragmatically pick and choose from the full range of qualifications on offer, be they vocational or academic, and "scale" these individually for the given field of work. A personnel development spokesman from a medium-sized mechanical engineering company also refers to the mix of dual system initial vocational training, trainee programmes, degrees from universities and universities of applied science as a "smorgasbord, the way we take people and internally place them where we want them".

The larger and older the companies in traditional sectors such as transport, energy, metal and electrical, the more likely they are to have a repertoire of established advancement routes built around vocational qualifications. To fill skilled-worker and skilled-clerk positions, they draw exclusively from their own staff body. External recruitment is only used to attract university graduates. This applies particularly to engineers, although even here efforts are made to develop them from in-house staff if possible, for external candidates are associated with a comparatively high risk of misappointment. Moreover, it is highly desirable to have a certain percentage of graduates on the staff as "lateral thinkers" from an external background.

A similar situation prevails even for companies in newer industries such as the call-centre industry, where similar structures as in long established sectors are taking shape: these days, management positions are almost exclusively filled by staff promoted from the company's own ranks. Two sector-specific training occupations have already been established, even if the sector continues to profit from the high educational status of many external entrants who have acquired their qualifications in other vocational fields.

Generally a great interest is noted in dual courses of study and any associated cooperation with universities. The responses of those surveyed suggest that a new type of educational course is emerging which precisely meets the need for heightened qualification requirements whilst maintaining the desired contact with company practice. Dual study courses are assessed very positively because they combine theory and practice and also convey the necessary theoretical know-how for the management of technological progress. There is no perceived danger of a gradual displacement of staff with conventional dual-system qualifications. Instead, the new provision is welcomed as an answer to the previous lack of differentiation among university graduates.

Companies need a diverse and flexible repertoire of options for attracting staff, adapting to changing qualification needs and developing competence. They view their own in-company initial and advanced vocational training as an important prerequisite for securing this broader flexibility within their repertoire of options. The clarity of this finding is astonishing, considering that for many years the initial and advanced vocational training system has been accused of rigidity and poor adaptability, based solely on the organisation of its structures and.

The fact that human resources managers consider the dual system of initial vocational education and training to have proven its worth in practice, despite its somewhat negative reputation in the educational discourse, is not a new insight. What is new, however, is that companies are initiating and refining options for career advancement which complement the classic trajectory from initial vocational training via occupational experience to upgrading training. The interviews particularly touched on dual study courses, study programmes at universities of cooperative education, and the possibility of a degree at a university of applied sciences - following on from dual system vocational training or after completion of advanced vocational training - as alternative options.

Companies seem to be making increasing use of these options, which have been available for some long time, in order to combine the advantages of an academic education with those of occupational training in the workplace so as to piece together their own internal recruitment track. In this context, the companies repeatedly emphasise the great importance of imparting experiential learning relevant to the occupation along with practical know-how, and also socialisation into the company's practices as indispensable elements of training programmes.

On the basis of the findings presented here, no indications are found of the kind of polarisation at skilled worker level that was suggested in the introduction. On the contrary, vocationally trained skilled workers are in demand in companies, and their career-advancement routes are not "obstructed". For the time being, however, it remains to be seen how the occupational positions and activities ultimately branch out at management level, and whether the advancement opportunities hitherto available to skilled workers trained via the classic dual-system vocational route remain open to them in the same form.