The professional development and the ways of qualification and skills acquirement of trainers in further vocational education

Caroline Bonnes & Sabine Hochholdinger

Although further vocational education plays an important role within companies, little is known about the persons that work there as trainers or as adult educators, respectively. This is due to the high heterogeneity of this specific vocational field and to the challenge of being able to adequately describe the different characteristics and dimensions of this profession, which is also connected to the heterogeneity of the field. There is no vocational training, nor a university degree that qualifies explicitly for working as a trainer. Moreover, there are no obligatory standards regarding the acquirement of the necessary qualifications to work as a trainer.

To allow for an analysis of the trainer profession from multiple perspectives, 45 Interviews with trainers, human resource developers, and participants of trainings were analyzed. The professional development of the trainers was reconstructed from the data and three different career paths were identified. The formal, non-formal and informal ways of qualification and skills acquirement of trainers were analyzed from the perspective of all participants.

The career paths of the trainers showed different possibilities of accessing the trainer profession: a) starting a career as a trainer directly after university, b) starting a career as a trainer in form of a major job change or c) working as a trainer as a side job additionally to the main occupation. Furthermore, the results emphasize the great heterogeneity of the ways of qualification and skills acquirement, especially the importance of non-formal and informal acquirement.

Publications

Bonnes, C., & Hochholdinger, S. (2016). Die berufliche Entwicklung und die Wege des Qualifikations- und Kompetenzerwerbs des Weiterbildungspersonals in der beruflichen und betrieblichen Weiterbildung. bwp@, (29).

http://www.bwpat.de/ausgabe29/bonnes_hochholdinger_bwpat29.pdf