Getting into VET and Designing One's Career in VET

This paper has two foci. First, we will conceptualise the vocational choice process as a learning process. We argue that the vocational choice process is often only seen as a necessary pre-condition for the upcoming vocation decision. It is only marginally seen as an essential and first step in learning to shape your career in a self-determined way. During the vocational choice process, students are confronted with many expected but also unforeseen challenges. These are all learning opportunities that potentially could change the perspective on the world if the challenges would be taken as learning opportunities, instead of seeing them nasty disturbances. In VET, individuals learn to design their educational and professional life-long pathway by respecting the work-life balance. The pre-VET, pre-apprenticeship vocational choice process could offer the chance to engage students early in adapting a life-long perspective on their career planning. If we succeed to involve them in a transformative learning process in which they learn to deal with expected and unexpected challenges through reflection of the present situation in light of future development. Second, we will use the case study based on Swiss VET to illustrate our position. We present a situation where different systems and actors work together to get students very efficiently in education and training after school. It is partly - to put it bluntly - a semi-automatic process where school grades, broad interests, social expectations and control mechanisms assign students to specific further education and learning. We ask: Where does learning take place? Where do students transform their perception of the world of work? Therefore, we make the point to reframe the vocational choice process to make it a learning experience for life to get students into VET and to prepare them for a career in VET.