“There’s always someone else to blame”: a comparison of the political discourse surrounding “vocational maturity” in Germany and “employability” in the UK

ABSTRACT

There is considerable international interest in transitions from school to work. This article approaches the issue as part of the debate around ‘vocational maturity’ (Ausbildungsreife) in Germany and ‘employability’ in the United Kingdom. Vocational education and training systems in these two countries differ significantly, so the article takes a historical approach to analysing and comparing the discourse used, focusing primarily on which training policy actors make which arguments about Ausbildungsreife or employability under which social, economic and training conditions. Specifically, it uses trade union, employer association and government documents from the period 1977 to 2018, evaluating them using the heuristic tools of interpretative models to create an understanding of Ausbildungsreife and employability, phenomenological structure and narrative structure. The findings demonstrate differences over time in the way individual actors structure their arguments and major divergences between the discourse in the two countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Vocational maturity
• employability
• Germany
• United Kingdom
• actors
• discourse analysis

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to Prof. Dr. Lorna Unwin, Prof. Dr. Alison Fuller, Prof. Dr. Jim Hordern, Prof. Dr. Roger Harris, Prof. Dr. Thomas Deißinger and Dr. Junmin Li for sharing their expertise with us during the research. A special thanks goes to Prof. Dr. Paul Ryan for the very fruitful inputs and kindly providing us with a research base in Cambridge during our field work in the UK.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Employer representatives and trade unions generally demand a great deal from the school system in order to prepare young people for the world of work. Whether this claim is not often too high, is not part of this study.

2. It should be pointed out that in both countries the topic focused on here could also be brought into connection with the political discussion about young people not in education, employment or training (NEET). However, ‘Ausbildungsreife’ in Germany and ‘employability’ in the UK are only specific factors that describes this problem in both countries (Holmes, Murphy, and Mayhew 2021; Pilz, Schmidt-Altmann, and Eswein 2015). Since the research focus is explicitly on ‘Ausbildungsreife’ and ‘employability’ and the document analysis carried out (see below) shows that the actors largely conduct these two topics of discussion separately, the topic of NEET will not be explicitly addressed here.

3. The different use of the constructs in the two countries, in particular the understanding of ‘employability’ in the German context (see e.g. Kraus 2008) is not part of the present study, as this does not genuinely address initial training in Germany.