Newly Arrived Women’s Educational and Professional Choices

Abstract This study focuses on the stories of four newly arrived women and their choices of vocational education and profession. The study highlights the women’s life courses and addresses how their vocational skills from their home countries can influence their choices of vocational education and profession, and how these skills are utilised in Sweden. The study also examines the cultural, social, economic, and symbolic capital that emerges from the women’s stories. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of capital is used to explain the women’s choices of vocational education and profession, suggesting a connection between the capital that women carry with them and their private and vocational experiences throughout their lives. The result shows that the women’s choices of vocational education and profession are related to their previous life experiences and adapted to the efforts of the Swedish state to shorten the path to employment for adult immigrants through Yrkesvux, a combined education programme. Additionally, the women’s vocational skills from their home countries are mostly used through their own business activities in Sweden. Newly arrived women’s vocational skills are changing the existing history of women’s skills and adding tasks that traditionally have not existed in Sweden, for example carpet tying, facial threading, and oriental cooking and baking. These skills must be cared for by the Swedish education system, which is constructed and reconstructed in step with technological development and social change. Caring for new professional skills can, for example, be to create conditions for young people to learn and develop these skills for the benefit of society.