3s at the 5th Conference on Vocational and Educational Training Research (BBFK) in Steyr, Upper Austria

The motto of this year’s VET Research Conference that took place from 7th to 8th August 2016 in Steyr, was ‘Vocational Education and Training, a Renaissance?’. The 3s team was actively involved with numerous actvities.

VET as a ‚model‘ has received more and more attention in recent years, and with it expectations and hopes are high, such as triggering impulses for innovation and employment, social integration through improving participation, decreasing the amount of losers of modernisation or increasing individual and social wealth. The role of VET in this is to act as a motor, catalyst or facilitator.

The VET Research Conference of 2016 raised the question whether this ‚renaissance‘ is just a form of nostalgia, the late appreciation of a traditional sector or something completelydifferent?
The 3s team actively contributed to the conference with several paper presentations and took part in expert panels as well as chair activities:

• Claudia Plaimauer talked about ‚Automatically processed Online-Job-Advertisement as a source of information for regional Labour Market Monitoring’.
• Karin Luomi-Messerer and Monika Auzinger presented a paper on ‘Higher VET – an emerging sub-system of education and training in European Member States?‘
• Janine Wulz, Mariya Dzhengozova and Monika Auzinger gave a report on ’ The Contribution of the Learning Outcomes Approach to Improved Quality Assessment Procedures in Vocational Education and Training. An analysis of case studies.‘
• Jörg Markowitsch and Karin Luomi-Messerer took part in an expert panel discussion on „Lessons from apprenticeship? New insights from Policy Transfer Projects in Austrian VET‘
• Stefan Humpl acted as chair of ‚Paper Session 11‘ on ‚New Approaches in the Austrian Public Employment Service (AMS)‘

The documentation of the BBFK Conference 2016 is available on the conference website (only in German).

There is also a conference video that was done by students of the PH OÖ, the Teacher Training College of Upper Austria (in German).