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This project was designed to gather data from staff currently employed in the vocational education and training (VET) sector on how their employment has changed. It was also concerned with understanding how staff experience their working lives as careers. In this way, the study aimed to inform VET organisations about how they might best use their organisational and human resource capabilities in order to respond to the emerging expectations of current and future staff in the sector, while also maintaining the type of workforce needed to deliver the outcomes desired by policy makers and governments. The VET sector contains a diversity of career pathways that are characterised by both individual and institutional considerations. While organisational characteristics, perhaps best exemplified by the public-private divide, are significant, data from this research illustrate that career pathways in both these components of the VET sector do unfold in similar (although not identical) ways. What is more significant is the illustration of the ways in which different career pathways unfold for staff employed in various occupations across the sector. This suggests that the occupational roles embedded in particular organisational contexts play a key role in shaping potential career pathways for VET staff. Significantly, respondents reported that their decisions about their careers were more often driven by internal considerations such as job satisfaction, support from colleagues and their own self-esteem and confidence than workload issues and the availability of full-time work.