'No one grows up saying they want to work in VET, do they?': a study of career pathways in VET: literature review

In Australia and overseas, relationships between employers and the employed continue to be transformed. As a result, the concept of career can no longer be defined through a single lifestage, vocational choice or lifetime employer/organisation. Rather, labour market conditions created by various factors (impacts of globalisation, information technology growth and a diversification of the workforce coupled with regulation or deregulation, privatisation, competition and a shift in traditional work from manufacturing to service/technology) has brought into being changing understandings of career. Career is now understood as a concept going beyond an individual’s employment status to reach into their engagement with social, environmental and educational factors to become part of their individual experience. Alongside this transformation for individuals, the field of human resource management and organisations are being challenged to think about how best to respond to these observed changes. This review is organised into a number of sections. In the first section, various understandings of career are examined in a broad sense to identify what changes have occurred and what these may mean for both individuals and organisations. Reasons for these changes are examined alongside ideas of how ‘career’ may manifest in terms of an individual’s engagement with the concept. The second section examines the implications of these changing notions of career for individuals and for those parts of organisations with responsibility for workforce development. In the final section, the literature relating to the overall [vocational education and training] VET workforce is examined with particular emphasis on the changing nature of work in the sector, career pathways and the ways in which various practices are organised to support both individual and organisational development.

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