Nevertheless, the conditions on which these systems are based appear to be changing. In the past, the transition from school to work has meant finding stable employment in an occupation, industry, or company. Now employment is becoming increasingly fluid, occupational boundaries are changing or dissolving, and more jobs are temporary (Cappelli, 1995; Carnoy, 1995). Because employers themselves are being forced to become more flexible in response to more rapid mobility of information and capital, work is increasingly "learning-intensive." This is true in large firms that are involving employees in continual problem solving. Continuous learning is also necessary for the growing number of workers who move from one temporary job to another (Seavey & Kazis, 1994). As described in the next section, employers are being pushed to explore new methods to engineer learning into the work itself. The boundary between learning and production is becoming increasingly difficult to define in many work situations. Under these new conditions, employer involvement in school-to-work systems no longer means helping schools train students for predictable jobs. Instead, employers and schools together are caught up in an evolution toward some new institutional arrangement where flexible production and continuous learning must happen at the same time.
This trend poses a challenge for school-to-work systems that have functioned well in the past in Japan and in the German speaking countries, as well as for countries where the school-to-work transition has already been relatively difficult. One challenge is to overcome the rigidity and fragmentation that sometimes afflict vocational training. Rapidly shifting markets and technology leave narrowly trained workers vulnerable. Preparing young people for hundreds of specific occupational categories may not be appropriate for the fluid world of learning-intensive work. Therefore, Germany and other countries where training systems are organized around strictly defined occupations have taken steps to reduce the number of vocational lines and broaden the skills that vocational students are taught.[5]
A second major challenge to traditional systems is that many students are turning away from vocational tracks and seeking to enroll in academic streams leading to university. Increasingly, higher academic education is seen as the road to higher income and status. Even in Germany, there is some evidence that employers are recruiting higher education graduates for positions that had previously been filled by internal promotions of apprenticeship graduates. "The traditional careers of skilled workers are in certain sectors threatened by the competition of graduates from Fachhochschulen [polytechnics] and universities," according to Durand-Drouhin and Romani (OECD, 1994, p. 11).
In some German industries, a traditional career path has begun with apprenticeship leading to employment as a skilled worker (Facharbeiter), then followed by additional training at Fachhochschule and subsequent promotion. For example, Mickler (1996) has observed this career pattern in the machine tool design industry, where traditionally a large proportion of design engineers began as apprentices and skilled workers. Such engineers have had the advantage of being able to communicate easily with skilled workers responsible for actually producing the new tools or prototypes. However, the advent of computer-assisted design and simulation has led companies increasingly to recruit new engineers from among recent university graduates who are theoretically trained in experimental procedures, informatics, and electronics, but who have not served apprenticeships or gained experience as skilled workers. Mickler reports that the proportion of university-trained engineers in this industry grew from 17% in 1961 to 28% in 1987 and 33% in 1992. In those same years, the fraction from Fachhochschulen was 66%, 67%, and 63%, respectively, while the proportion of engineers who had not completed university or Fachhochschule fell from 17% to 5% to 4%. Consequently, "the number of good [secondary school] graduates who go through a vocational training in the enterprises to become a Facharbeiter and then stay there for long years as skilled workers has dramatically decreased" (pp. 15-16).
Policymakers in Germany and most other industrialized countries have therefore been questioning whether the traditional separation between vocational and academic pathways will remain useful in the emerging economy. Most countries have maintained separate vocational and academic education systems for students after their mid-teens. These systems are often housed in separate buildings, follow different curricula, target different students, employ different kinds of teachers, and relate differently to other institutions and actors in society. In Germany, where most teenagers complete apprenticeships, the dual system has been able to maintain high academic standards, and the system is being constantly upgraded, in part to keep more young people from bypassing apprenticeship for higher education. In countries where only a minority of young people participate in vocational training, however, achieving high academic standards on the vocational side is more difficult.
One of the great pedagogical advantages of vocational education is that it often includes learning by doing that enables students to apply the concepts they are studying. But as the rate of technological change has continued to increase and the organization of work has become more unstable, the specific procedural skills imparted by vocational training risk becoming irrelevant. At the same time, academic education emphasizes more abstract theory and general analytic skills which should have more enduring value. Traditional methods of teaching, however, often leave graduates unable to apply their knowledge in a practical context (Resnick, 1987). Both vocational and academic education in their traditional forms therefore have certain strengths, but they are insufficient by themselves to prepare students for careers that will require continual learning in the context of work. In Germany, the dual system--linking schools with employers--provides a framework in which it is possible to combine the advantages of vocational and academic education. In countries that rely mainly on schools to provide vocational education, new initiatives have been designed in response to this challenge.
To inform the development of policy and practice in the United States, this report describes the apparent convergence of policies in industrialized countries toward four principles:
The next section of this report, "Learning-Intensive Production," describes in more detail how work is becoming more learning-intensive. Some of the measures taken in several countries to integrate vocational and academic education are then summarized in the section entitled, "Integrating Vocational and Academic Education." Three components that are considered important in successful school-to-work systems are elaborated in the sections entitled, "Skill Standards," "Work-Based Learning for Students," and "Governance": skill standards that reinforce rather than conflict with the integration of vocational and academic education; work-based learning that is well-coordinated with vocational and academic instruction in school; and emerging educational governance strategies that share power between employers and educators. Special attention is given to whether these components have been used in conjunction with efforts to bring vocational and academic education closer together. The final section adds a concluding note.
[5] Jeff King suggests that the real issue here is not the number of vocational specialties, but "the question of how specific is `specific' for an occupational training category. And if this is the real issue, as I think it is, then we need to find ways of talking about [it] which do not overlook the considerable synergies of higher order knowledge and cognitive skills, not to mention basic knowledge in math, science, and literacies (including foreign languages) built into well constructed technical training categories in lead country apprenticeship programs, where six years of a foreign language and several years of comparative religion and political science and economics at the U.S. community college level at least are the property of virtually all apprentices, even in hairdressing or auto repair."