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This article observes that vocational education and training's identity has been founded on four types of characteristics: epistemological, teleological, hierarchical and pragmatic. No single characteristic is found to be adequate to identify vocational education and training across jurisdictions, and across historical periods. Both Rushbrook and Stevenson seek for vocational education and training what Rushbrook calls an 'abstracted institutional teleology'. Yet such a quest may degenerate into essentialism, and in any case is vulnerable to being made obsolete by the changes that vocational education and training is meant to be stimulating and to equip us for life. The article concludes by arguing for a definition of vocational education and training which is a compound of the four general characteristics considered.