Improving the standing of vocational education and training (VET) has confounded governments globally for decades. Yet, a skilled workforce is the backbone of any society and economy. The pandemic of 2020 and 2021 has highlighted the importance of robust skills formation systems at all levels as workers have deployed knowledge and skills rapidly to deal with the medical, social, and economic situation working towards recovery. In so far as there are two post-school routes into skilled employment – the vocational and the academic – the first predominantly has a specific occupational focus, for example a hairdresser, carpenter or technician; the second leads to employment after gaining an undergraduate (sometimes Masters) degree leading mostly to a professional occupation such as lawyer, consultant or physiotherapist. While both routes lead to the labour market, employment is really only the stated purpose of the first route; it is not the explicit raisons d’etre of higher education. To that end the vocational and academic routes that make up education systems have different purposes, for different stakeholders, with different outcomes; they can be complementary routes but are not analogous. Yet, the standing of the vocational route, more often than not, in most countries of the world, is compared to the academic route. Calls for equivalence belie the fundamental intention and importance of each and while these calls have persisted, parity between the two routes has not been achieved. Indeed, this chapter argues that parity of the two routes is unachievable. The purpose and the nature of VET means that the standing of technical vocational education and training needs to be promoted in its own right. This promotion will stem from a better understanding of its purpose. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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