Meeting the Demand? Students within Swedish Advanced Vocational Education Entering the Labour Market: Reflections from an Ongoing Research Project

This article considers an ongoing research project concerning the outcome of the Swedish reform of advanced vocational education (AVE) from a graduate perspective. Launched in 1996 as an experimental post-secondary reform meeting the advancements within working life, several new educational features were introduced. In January 2002, AVE became a regular part of the national education system with 12,500 education places per annum. From start to present, over 6,100 students have graduated from the approximately 350 different national AVE programmes available. The purpose of this article is to present results from three sets of questionnaires collected in 1999, 2000 and 2001 surveying over 5,400 of the graduates concerning their opinions and experiences on how AVE corresponds to the demands and requests made of them when entering the labour market. The aggregate results suggest that a majority of the graduates (82%) had a job 6 months after having completed their AVE programmes and that approximately 80% of them were working, with regard to their educational focus, within a ‘target’ field of profession.