ABSTRACT
The German type of dual apprenticeship has currently gained attention as a blueprint for successful educational structures. This chapter argues that the functioning of such an apprenticeship system depends essentially on its occupational structure. Occupations are mostly perceived as an aspect of employment, constituting certain patterns of learning and training needs, to which education has to respond. In apprenticeship an occupation constitutes a whole framework of formal regulations (curricula or training requirements, examination rules and systems, credentials for the labour market, etc.), thus it can be named as the core institutional element of this kind of vocational education and training (VET).
The main argument is that with respect to apprenticeship a differentiation of two kinds of occupations is necessary: training occupations and performed occupations, where the former are part of the educational structure, and the latter are part of the employment structure. The structure and distribution of training occupations might differ widely from the performed occupations, and the training occupations resemble systematically rather to an academic discipline than to a ‘real’ occupation in employment.
The analysis takes the Austrian structure as a case, which is in several aspects unique, in that it combines apprenticeship, state VET schools and colleges, layered higher education and dense professions, and provides a kind of ‘modernized traditionalism’. It is shown that the institutionalization ostensibly focuses very much on aspects of content, tasks and competences, however, these categories in fact work very much as a kind of black box, as a basic structuring device of the whole institutional architecture. The empirical indications show how much the formal occupational structure is represented by dense actors’ structures, which turn the enactment of the institutional structures into a topic of everyday practices at the decentralized level. This analysis gives one aspect of how occupational structures might work in practice in a system that builds essentially on occupations.
