Norwegian vocational teachers rehearse apprenticeship readiness through four classroom approaches

When Norwegian students leave the classroom for an apprenticeship, the groundwork for that leap has often been laid months earlier in deliberately staged lessons: a blindfolded teenager being guided through winter streets, a school shop running on trust and shift rotas, a fictional customer named Mrs Olsen whose unpaid invoices teach the cost of lateness. A new qualitative study published in Empirical Research in Vocational Education and Training maps how vocational teachers across three Norwegian programmes translate the expectations of working life into teachable classroom practice, and finds that the emphasis falls less on trade skills than on punctuality, reliability, communication and cooperation.

The study, led by Kari-Anne Kverneggen with Evi Schmid and Silje Andresen, draws on focus groups and individual interviews with 37 vocational teachers, 25 women and 12 men, recruited from 15 schools in two Norwegian counties. The teachers worked in three upper secondary programmes chosen for their contrasting apprenticeship markets: electrical power and health work, where comparatively more students fail to secure a placement, and sales and tourism, where positions typically outnumber applicants. Data were collected between April and October 2024 through nine focus groups of two to five teachers and ten individual interviews, with sessions averaging 94 and 128 minutes respectively. Most participants held a trade or journeyman’s certificate in their field and had substantial work experience before entering teaching, with an average of ten years as vocational teachers.

The Norwegian context makes this school-based preparation distinctive. Under the country’s 2 + 2 model, young people normally spend two years in school-based vocational education and training, typically aged 17 to 18, before beginning a two-year apprenticeship in an approved company that leads to one of more than 180 trade and journeyman’s certificates. This differs sharply from dual systems such as Germany and Switzerland, where apprenticeships usually begin at 15 or 16 and school-based and workplace learning run in parallel. In Norway, upper secondary schools therefore carry the main burden of preparing students for the transition, and the current Completion Reform explicitly requires that second-year students practise applying for apprenticeships, understand what it means to be an apprentice, and learn what employers will expect of them.

The stakes are considerable. Around 98 percent of Norwegian young people start upper secondary education immediately after compulsory school, and about 55 percent of them enrol in vocational programmes. Yet students are not guaranteed an apprenticeship: despite incentive grants and growing contract numbers, roughly one-fifth of applicants, approximately 6,000 young people, do not secure a placement each year. Employers may also decline to hire applicants they judge insufficiently qualified, motivated or mature. Because decisions rest with training companies, the teachers’ work operates against a backdrop of genuine scarcity, and the researchers note that employers in Norway typically prioritise motivation, interest in the trade, low absenteeism and performance during work placements over subject grades.

Thematic analysis of the interviews identified four recurrent pedagogical approaches. The first and most frequently highlighted was classroom simulation of workplace settings: casework, school-based enterprises, role-plays with customers and patients, and rehearsals of everyday workplace routines. In the health work programme, one teacher described an annual ‘blind week’ in which students worked in pairs, one blindfolded and guided by the other to a supermarket some distance from the school, often in winter conditions, to train observation and responsibility and to rehearse accompanying older adults with mobility difficulties. In sales and tourism, teachers ran school-based shops where students worked scheduled shifts, making the consequences of absence immediately visible to peers. In electrical power, a teacher imported the ‘barrack chat’, the informal morning briefing held in a construction site hut, into the classroom as a low-stakes exercise in collaborative problem-solving.

The second approach was experience-based storytelling. Teachers drew on personal practice, accounts from former students and sometimes fictionalised cases to make tacit workplace norms concrete. One health work teacher recounted hiding in a utility room as a newly qualified healthcare worker when a patient’s call bell rang, using her own fear to open a discussion about responsibility and to normalise uncertainty as a common feature of the transition from student to employee. In electrical power, a teacher used a recurring fictional customer, Mrs Olsen, to link punctuality and time discipline to billable consequences, telling late students that neither the customer nor the company would pay for lost time and that they would have to work overtime to make it up. The researchers characterise storytelling as cognitive rehearsal that renders the ‘hidden curriculum’ of unspoken workplace rules explicit and open to appraisal.

The third approach combined mock interviews with biographical self-work to prepare students for selection encounters. Teachers, often with careers counsellors and Norwegian-language teachers, supported CVs and applications, rehearsed interviews and helped students translate experiences from work placements, part-time jobs and extracurricular activities into employer-relevant points, including skills students had initially dismissed, such as coaching football or selling ice cream. In one health work programme, interviews were conducted by colleagues who did not teach the candidates, recreating the full cycle from application to post-interview feedback. Teachers in electrical power reported having to force students to make phone calls and noted that many did not routinely check or reply to emails, sometimes missing positive responses from companies. Support ranged from coaching on handshakes and eye contact to sending students home to change out of jogging trousers before an interview.

The fourth approach, facilitated reflection and discussion, cut across the others but also operated independently. Teachers used structured and informal conversations to help students interpret experiences, articulate workplace expectations and anticipate what would be required of them as apprentices. One health work teacher emphasised asking curious questions in return rather than providing ready-made answers, prompting students to wonder why workplace staff do things in a particular way and what they themselves would have done. In sales and tourism, a missed shift in the school-based bazaar became the entry point for reflection on how absenteeism affects colleagues and customers, moving students from concern about their own inconvenience to recognition of lost trust and conflict in ordinary customer-facing workplaces.

Across all four approaches, the teachers consistently foregrounded domain-general competencies, punctuality, reliability, communication, cooperation and responsibility, while embedding them in field-specific tasks: hygiene and observation in health work, coordination and accountability in electrical power, and mutual reliance in sales and tourism. The researchers argue this emphasis may appear counterintuitive in Norway’s 2 + 2 model, given that applicants have already completed two years of school-based VET, but that it mirrors research showing employers weight behavioural attributes heavily at selection. The form of preparation also varied by school context: in schools with lower admission requirements and more socially disadvantaged students, teachers provided close, hands-on support with applications and logistics, while in more advantaged settings they stressed student self-direction, sometimes reflecting on whether they might be helping too much.

The authors caution that the study rests entirely on teachers’ self-reports from a purposive sample in two counties, without classroom observations, employer or student perspectives, or any assessment of outcomes such as apprenticeship contract attainment, so no conclusions can be drawn about the effectiveness of specific practices. They also note a critical dimension: following the notion of the ‘apprentice-ready self’, these practices can be read as socialisation into employer-valued norms, and an overemphasis on behavioural regulation may narrow students’ professional agency and vocational knowledge development. At the same time, the findings qualify a simple critique by showing how domain-general and domain-specific competencies are interwoven in situated tasks. The researchers call for future work triangulating teachers’ accounts with employer and student perspectives, incorporating observations, and following cohorts longitudinally from school into apprenticeship.

Subject of Research: How vocational teachers in Norwegian upper secondary VET prepare students for apprenticeships through classroom pedagogy

Article Title: From classroom to apprenticeship: vocational teachers’ pedagogical approaches to apprenticeship preparation in three vocational fields in Norway

Article References: Kverneggen, K.-A., Schmid, E., & Andresen, S. (2026). From classroom to apprenticeship: vocational teachers’ pedagogical approaches to apprenticeship preparation in three vocational fields in Norway. Empirical Research in Vocational Education and Training, 18(1), Article 12. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40461-026-00213-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40461-026-00213-y

Keywords: vocational education and training, apprenticeship, Norway, school-to-work transition, vocational teachers, pedagogy, employer expectations, domain-general competencies, mock interviews, classroom simulation, 2+2 model, upper secondary education