Tag: Germany

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Educational biographies in Germany: From secondary school general education to lifelong learning?

Author: Harry Friebel, University of Hamburg

Summary:  This article addresses the change in the transitional process from secondary school general education to gainful employment within the framework of societal modernisation processes in Germany.
We analyse the relationship between the options for and restrictions upon individual educational mobility under the conditions imposed by the various socially institutionalised educational segments, which comprise a structure of opportunity.
The database for our study consists in the longitudinal findings of the “Hamburg Biography and Life Course Panel” (HBLP) from 1980 to 2007, which examined the processes of vocational education mobility for a sample of the Hamburg graduating class of 1979.
How do these people manage their educational strategies? What do they experience in terms of vocational education and continuing education within the institutional structure of opportunity? Do the career paths differ after gender?

Keywords: Vocational training, Educational Biography, Vocational training mobility, Continuing education, Vocational education policy, Germany

 

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This article is part of AJAL, Volume 54_2. The entire volume is available in .pdf for purchase here.

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Competency-based training: different perceptions in Australia and Germany

Author/s: Silke Hellwig

Edition: Volume 46, Number 1, April 2006

Summary: The German dual apprenticeship system has traditionally been viewed as an effective system for generating a highly skilled workforce in the trades, crafts and service sectors. In addition, countries and systems looking to improve their own approaches to vocational education and training (VET) have considered as exemplary the main features of the ‘dual system’ (that is, two learning sites and shared responsibility between private employers and public vocational schools). Nevertheless, competency-based training (CBT) as it has been implemented in the Anglophone countries has increasingly attracted the attention of public officials, vocational educators and VET researchers in Germany. This attention has been especially focused on the modularisation of curriculum and the importance of vocationalism in education and training systems. Comparative studies of these dual concepts (for example Deissinger 2002, Ertl 2000) have been used to inform  policy and practice. This paper focuses on the competency-based approach to VET in Australia and examines how reforms aimed at developing a national system, and implementing CBT in curriculum, training delivery and assessment are evaluated by stakeholders (for example, representatives of government, educators and academics). It also compares reforms to VET in Australia with those used in Germany for reforming and restructuring the dual system. This analysis is used to generate conclusions about the extent to which aspects of the Australian CBT model might be successfully applied to dual system reforms in Germany.

Keywords: dual apprenticeship, VET, competency-based training, Germany

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