In the hairdressing occupation emotional labour has often come to overshadow other vocational skills. The present study, using ethnographic methods, explores how students and teachers in vocational education and training (VET) for hairdressers in Sweden describe and explain the emotional labour being carried out when a hairdresser perform good…

Experiencing a teacher shortage, Sweden has allowed vocational teachers to gain employment without teaching qualifications. In this context, a population of non-qualified vocational teachers has emerged, a group of people rarely captured by national statistics and previous research. This study aims to shed light on the profile of non-qualified…

The COVID-19 pandemic challenged the daily continuity of young people by causing financial insecurity, remote work/studies, loss of work, loneliness, stress, and unpredictability of the future. This study explores the experiences of pandemic-time graduates from Finland and Sweden in the transition from higher education to work. Finland and Sweden…

This article focuses on 'successful migrants', who have succeeded in gaining employment in Sweden in their previous vocational area. The aim is to describe factors on various levels -- individual, organisational and national -- that have facilitated migrants' way back to work as well as their inclusion at workplaces. Twenty migrants and five…

Incorporation into the labour market is a key endeavour, of heightened importance in recent years due to high migration flows, for both immigrants and their recipient countries. Hence, activation and employability are major themes in both transnational and national policy discussions, which have generated various programmes and policy measures.…

Students in vocational education may experience situations during on-the-job training in which power relations are strongly manifested, with considerable potential for learning about democracy that have been far from fully explored. Thus, here we analyse how Swedish vocational education and training (VET) students perceived and experienced power…

Changes in working life require development in vocational education and training (VET) to retain industrial currency. VET teachers are key actors in VET, and their continuing professional development (CPD) in vocational subjects is central to the currency of VET. This study is situated in Sweden, with a mainly school-based VET system where VET…

The purpose of my paper is to describe and explain the probability of staying in temporary work for young people (age 16-27) in Sweden between 1992 and 2011 and its relation to socioeconomic outcomes (low socioeconomic classification and wage). I used panel data from the Swedish Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the longitudinal integration database…

The aim of this article is to problematize the ways class and gender are played out in adult students' narratives about their occupational choice and future. Drawing on Beverly Skeggs, we analyse how students think about future occupations, what motivates them towards these and how they are able to form their future in relation to them. Taking on…

Surges of migration into Sweden and other European countries have raised needs to adjust civic education to provide Bernsteinian pedagogic rights of enhancement, participation and inclusion, both generally and in VET specifically. However, associated issues have received little research attention even in countries with colonial histories and…

This article examines the long-run effect of higher education, measured in average years of tertiary schooling, on the level and growth rate of national per capita income. It uses an improved dataset on educational attainments which not only reduces measurement error but also overcomes data comparability issues and allows us to estimate the…

Based on Swedish register data from 2003 to 2012, this study attempts to explain over-education and upward mobility among tertiary graduates. Rarely used explanatory factors are central in the analyses, such as 'still in study' and 'field of education'. Tertiary graduates in low-wage jobs are regarded as over-educated. The results of this work…

This study investigates continuing professional development (CPD) of vocational teachers, with a focus on recurrent participation. Vocational teachers need to be competent as teachers and in relation to their vocational teaching subject. Reformation of Swedish vocational education in order to strengthen the working-life connection imposes demands…

This article aims to deepen understanding of the trajectories through school and into adulthood of people who did not attain valued qualifications from upper secondary school ("non-completers"), and explore the fruitfulness of careership theory for such analysis. It is based on interviews with 100 young Swedes: 81 non-completers and 19…

This study explores industry-education collaboration on vocational education and training (VET) in upper secondary schools in Sweden and Norway, with particular attention to the initiatives, organisation and operational management, and aspects of robustness and lock-in effects. The case studies include two upper secondary schools situated in…