Linking Transformation and Skill Formation: The Evolving Role of the State in European Vocational Education and Training Systems

Skills shortages are closely linked to socio-economic transformations, such as the decarbonization and digitalization of modern knowledge economies, as well as demographic change. These transformations have given rise to a new European industrial policy (Seidl & Schmitz, 2023). Similarly, in recent years, states have begun to take on a more active role in the governance of skills (Busemeyer et al., 2022). This paper draws on a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to study the changing role of states in initial and continuing vocational education and training and explores the link between skills policy and socio-economic transformation. In a first step, I investigate the changing role of the state in VET. I use natural language processing to analyze the involvement of states and firms in VET, which are constitutive of the dominant typology of skill formation systems developed by Busemeyer and Trampusch (2011). Specifically, I employ latent dirichlet allocation topic modeling to identify the directions of change across VET systems in all EU member states. This analysis draws on a novel dataset consisting of standardized high-quality country-level descriptions of education systems and reforms. The timeframe of analysis spans from 2005 to 2022. Second, I trace the references to structural change and the resulting skills shortages in the descriptions of national vocational education systems, as well as the justifications of the most recent skills policies, to explore how both topics might be interlinked. Last but not least, alongside a number of quantitative validation techniques, I evaluate the findings through two qualitative case studies that build on document analysis and elite interviews. I focus on Germany and France as representatives of the two dominant types of skill formation systems in the EU, collective and statist skill formation systems. This paper does not claim to prove a causal link between structural change and skills policy. However, it aims at developing a plausible explanation for a changing role of states in skill formation that can subsequently be tested. Methodologically, the paper connects traditional case study research and novel computational text analyses.