Academic drifts in vocational, professional, and continuing education: A multi-perspective approach for the case of Switzerland

In this article, we examine the phenomenon of ‘academic drifts’ within vocational education. Our objective is to gain a well-informed epistemic understanding of various aspects of academic drifts, considering their complexity and enabling meaningful conclusions. By heuristically exploring three different cases at their systematic, institutional, and functional levels, as well as temporal junctures of the Swiss education system, we show the different developments in the distribution of vocational and academic education, leading to a broader and less simplistic understanding of ongoing academic drifts. The cases under study cover three areas of vocational education in which we want to empirically identify aspects of academic drifts: vocational education teacher training, professional education and training, and continuing education and training at universities. We find that all three cases show different variations in academic drifts within the same education system, which is why we deliberately speak in the plural. According to our thesis, these drifts create different areas of tension for vocational education: academic drifts appear as external and internal tertiarisation, formalisation of qualifications and competences, and marketisation trends in education. The Swiss education system serves as an example, demonstrating that even in a country with a strong focus on vocational education and measures to support it, intended and unintended academic drifts take place within and around vocational education.