Vocational Schools Could Turn Construction Workers Into Entrepreneurs, Review Finds

For millions of construction workers around the world, the path from laying bricks on someone else’s site to running their own contracting business has always been a matter of luck, hustle, and informal apprenticeships. A new review published in Discover Education argues that this transformation should not be left to chance. Drawing on 52 publications and institutional sources spanning more than two decades, researchers from Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta and Universitas Negeri Jakarta present a framework showing how technical and vocational education and training, commonly known as TVET, can deliberately convert occupational competence into entrepreneurial careers. The study, led by Daniel Jesayanto Jaya with colleagues Putu Sudira and Nuryadin Eko Raharjo, repositions vocational education from a pipeline into wage employment to a multi-level system capable of producing business owners, subcontractors, and micro-enterprise founders.

The timing of the research is significant. Infrastructure development remains a pillar of economic strategy in emerging economies such as Indonesia, where the construction sector absorbs workers with wildly varying educational backgrounds and employment arrangements. Policy initiatives, including Presidential Regulation No. 68 of 2022 and the National Strategy for Vocational Education and Vocational Training, have formally committed the country to strengthening vocational education. Yet the authors contend that a narrow interpretation of TVET as simply a jobs pipeline is no longer sufficient. Workers increasingly need the capacity to reconfigure their careers, create economic opportunities, and participate in entrepreneurial ecosystems, particularly as technological disruption, demographic change, and the reorganization of labour markets reshape the future of work.

Construction, the researchers argue, offers an unusually fertile setting for this kind of career transformation. Unlike sectors where starting a business demands large capital investments or sophisticated technological assets, many construction ventures can begin with little more than occupational skill, project experience, professional relationships, basic tools, and local demand. An experienced mason, carpenter, plumber, electrician, or site supervisor can plausibly become a subcontractor, renovation-service provider, building-maintenance entrepreneur, cost estimator, materials supplier, or small contractor. The project-based nature of the industry, with its layered contracting and subcontracting arrangements, means workers routinely move between sites, clients, and firms, accumulating the market awareness and relational capital that later underpin independent enterprise.

To explain how this conversion actually happens, the team conducted a structured thematic evidence review covering literature published between 2000 and 2024 in Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, and Google Scholar, supplemented by citation tracking and policy documents. A targeted update covering January 2025 to June 2026 refreshed the theoretical and international context. Rather than treating the evidence base as a statistical sample, the researchers used thematic synthesis, coding findings into descriptive categories and then developing higher-order analytical themes. The process yielded five interrelated clusters: construction-sector opportunity structures, vocational skill formation, entrepreneurial capability development, institutional and policy scaffolding, and psychological and socio-cultural mediation.

These clusters converge into three enabling drivers that form the backbone of the proposed framework. The first is vocationally enhanced individual agency. Technical competence, the review finds, provides the foundation for occupational credibility, confidence, and autonomy. In construction, no worker can credibly offer independent services without mastery of occupational standards, measurement, materials, safety practices, scheduling, and quality control. But competence alone is not enough. It becomes career-transformative only when workers can make decisions, assume responsibility, evaluate risk, and recognize the economic value of their expertise. The authors stress that technical learning contributes most strongly to entrepreneurial readiness when learners plan work, solve authentic problems, evaluate quality, and communicate professional decisions.

The second driver is institutional and policy scaffolding. Entrepreneurship is often framed as a purely individual choice, but the review emphasizes that transitions are heavily shaped by certification systems, procurement access, financing, mentoring, licensing, insurance, taxation, and market trust. In construction, these barriers are formidable. TVET institutions can reduce them by acting as connectors, partnering with contractors, professional associations, certification bodies, local governments, financial institutions, and business incubators. International evidence cited in the review shows the downside of getting this wrong: fragmented governance, weak industry-education collaboration, and insufficient practical training can hobble workforce development even when formal vocational policies exist on paper.

The third driver is entrepreneurial ecosystem support, the broader web of market demand, professional networks, technology, finance, and social legitimacy that determines whether individual capability and institutional support can actually be mobilized into sustained business activity. The framework is explicit that the three drivers are interdependent. Individual capability without institutional support may never lead to enterprise formation. Institutional support without occupational competence may produce weak or unsafe services. And both can remain ineffective when market demand, professional networks, and social legitimacy are absent. This systems-level logic draws on career ecosystem theory, sustainable career theory, and the Systems Theory Framework, integrated with TVET philosophies ranging from pragmatism to essentialism and reconstructionism.

One of the review’s most consequential findings concerns pedagogy. Entrepreneurship education, the authors argue, should not be a generic theoretical module bolted onto technical training. Instead, entrepreneurial capability should be learned through authentic construction tasks: preparing estimates, developing quotations, communicating with clients, documenting safety requirements, scheduling activities, coordinating labour and materials, and evaluating profitability. Challenge-based entrepreneurship courses in vocational schools, which expose learners to real-world problems and external stakeholders, show promise, although outcomes depend on course design and learners’ prior entrepreneurial orientations. Construction-oriented incubators within vocational institutions could go further, allowing learners and graduates to prototype renovation services, digital drafting offerings, energy-efficiency solutions, and maintenance packages before entering the market.

The review is notably candid about the psychological and socio-cultural dimensions of the transition. Moving from employee to entrepreneur requires what the authors call occupational identity reconstruction, a shift in how workers see themselves, from skilled labourers to service providers, subcontractors, or business owners. This process is mediated by self-efficacy, resilience, family expectations, community norms, risk tolerance, and social legitimacy. In communities where family and social relationships strongly shape economic decisions, entrepreneurship may be seen either as a desirable route to independence or as an unstable gamble. Gender, social background, and access to institutional resources matter too, with evidence from the Caribbean showing that structural inequalities can block the path from skills training to sustainable self-employment unless mentoring and gender-sensitive practices accompany it.

Equally important is the review’s refusal to romanticize entrepreneurship. The authors distinguish between opportunity-driven transitions, associated with autonomy and upward mobility, and necessity-driven ones, in which workers turn to self-employment because of unemployment, unstable contracts, or limited career progression. Treating all entrepreneurial activity as evidence of career success, they warn, obscures unstable income, limited social protection, and occupational risk. Formalization presents its own tension: licensing, certification, and safety regulation can raise quality and legitimacy but may impose costs that micro-enterprises struggle to meet, suggesting a need for transitional and proportionate support.

The framework’s implications extend well beyond Indonesia. Many Global South economies share project-based employment, informal work, uneven certification, restricted access to capital, and reliance on community networks, making the mechanisms broadly transferable. Internationally, digitalization and the green transition are creating new entrepreneurial niches in energy-efficient renovation, building information modelling, circular construction, and digital project documentation, all of which demand continuously updated competencies. The authors call for longitudinal studies, comparative case studies, and intervention evaluations to test the framework empirically, including whether it operates differently across gender, migration status, informality, and digital access. Their central insight, however, is already clear: occupational competence becomes career-transformative only when workers can interpret and mobilize it as a resource for entrepreneurial action, and vocational institutions must be designed to help them do exactly that.

Subject of Research: The role of technical and vocational education and training in supporting entrepreneurial career transformation among construction sector workers

Article Title: Vocational education for entrepreneurial career transformation in the construction sector

Article References: Jaya, D. J., Sudira, P., & Raharjo, N. E. (2026). Vocational education for entrepreneurial career transformation in the construction sector. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1129. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02239-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02239-6

Keywords: vocational education, TVET, entrepreneurship, construction sector, career transformation, work-based learning, Indonesia, Global South, career ecosystems, skill formation, institutional policy, small enterprise