JVET Conference 2025

16th International Conference; Thu 24 - Sat 26 July 2025, Oxford, UK

The JVET Conference 2025 will explore Vocational Education and Training through the lens of the themes of journeys and destinations.  The call for abstracts (now closed) invited submissions that explore developments in VET as it strives to meet the challenges of economic austerity, climate change, political instability and increasingly rapid technological change. We look forward to exploring the journeys of VET systems addressing these challenges as they traverse the occupational boundaries between formal and informal, accredited and unaccredited vocational learning, between regulated and unregulated training, and between ‘vocational’ and ‘professional’ education. The conference will also explore the role of VET in reinforcing or combatting social closure through inclusive practice, and spatial closure through facilitating mobility.

Call for papers for a Special Issue of the Journal of Vocational Education and Training (JVET)

VET in the era of digital transformation: New forms of work and their implications for vocational learning

 Guest editors: Jim Hordern, Monika Nerland and Kevin Orr

This Special Issue aims to critically examine the workplace as a site of learning in the context of digital transformation in order to discuss and reflect on how vocational education and training is challenged and should respond to changes in expertise required in the workplace. To this end, the issue will:

  1. review the potential implications of digital transformation for work and vocational expertise; 

  2. present in-depth studies of work and learning in occupational settings affected by digital transformation, and 

  3. describe and conceptualise characteristics of work practices and learning that can be recontextualised within VET systems and practices.

Relevant topics include but are not limited to the implications of digital transformation for:

  • Forms and shifts in vocational expertise

  • Roles, responsibilities, and trust in the reconfiguration of work practices

  • Workers’ agency and participation in learning at work

  • Ways of facilitating and/or recognising learning in the workplace

  • Implications for VET pedagogy and curriculum