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The secrets behind Singapore's low youth unemployment are its ability-driven education, centrally planned manpower and social benefits tied to employment. But can it last under the pressure of an ageing population and rising unemployment in neighboring areas? This article discusses some of the reasons that could contribute to this favourable labour market outcome, although not an exhaustive commentary. For the complex matter of employment is determined by multifarious factors and cannot simply be addressed in one account. [The author instead focuses] this discussion by first teasing out supply-side explanations, with a backgrounder on the education and training systems of Singapore; second, [the author discusses] certain key institutional characteristics of the labour market that play a part in shaping outcomes. And third but not least important, [the article highlights] ongoing processes that could test and challenge the resilience of the city-state's youth (un)employment situation.

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Over the last 10 years, the adult education field in Singapore has shifted from being a largely private sphere, to one which encompasses a nationally regulated system of workforce development. Alongside this development was an agenda to professionalise adult educators to raise the quality of provision. There are many elements that affect the relationship between professionalisation and quality provision. The purpose of this research is to focus on adult educators' career trajectories and professional identities in this dynamic landscape. In particular, this research is concerned with the following questions: How do adult educators conceptualise their professional identities? How are adult educators constructing their career trajectories? How do adult educators perceive the government led professionalisation of their occupational field?

After defining the key concepts of this research, this report will begin by providing a brief background on the government-led professionalisation and 'workforce development' of Singapore's continuing education and training (CET) practitioners. It will then look at existing literature on the professionalisation of adult educators, their career paths and their professional identities. The study design will be presented before the findings of the data, which address the research questions. These findings will then be discussed in relation to their key implications and recommendations for Singapore's professionalisation of its CET practitioners.

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The confluence of increasing pressures on researchers to demonstrate the impact of their work with a growing interest in research informed practice and policy creates both opportunities and challenges for dialogue and partnership between researchers, policy makers and practitioners in adult, vocational and lifelong education and training. The Research Division of the Institute for Adult Learning in Singapore, part of the Singapore Workforce Development Agency, has attempted to grasp these opportunities, and address the challenges, through the development of a research strategy shaped by consultation with key stakeholders, from Workforce Skills Qualification (WSQ) course participants to senior policy makers. The implementation of this strategy has involved both the design of a program of policy and practice, relevant research and the development of a range of research capacity and capability development initiatives. In this paper the authors explore the process of facilitating the creation of a research community in continuing education and training (CET). In particular, they examine the ways in which specific research studies in key areas of adult learning, skills utilisation and innovation in CET have acted both to inform practice and policy and act as a medium for research capability building. The authors relate this work to the development of a framework for monitoring and evaluation of the impact of CET initiatives and, ultimately, investment in Singapore. From this they explore the ways in which such a framework can assist in establishing coherence in and the credibility of a research and development program that aims to maximise impact on practice.

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It is well established that participation in formal adult education varies by individual background characteristics. However, less attention has been paid to examining inequality in participation as a consequence of policy changes, such as educational expansion. This paper examines the process of tremendous expansion in Swedish Higher Vocational Education (HVE), a vocationally oriented postsecondary educational segment driven by labor market needs. Using a demographic approach with a sociological lens on educational participation, we analyze administrative data from registers, uncovering who has been served by this expanding adult educational form. Our results indicate that expansion of HVE has led to growth in participation for policy-prioritized groups, although the rate of growth in enrollment between groups varies and corresponds to population changes. We also locate the extent of cumulative advantages in participation and discuss these results in relation to social (in)equality in formalized HVE.

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This paper addresses the question of how higher vocational education and training programmes socialise participants for future work, where the occupational pathways they are to embark on are weakly defined. The analysis focuses on organisational rituals as a means to understand individual and collective transformative processes taking place at a particular intersection of education and labour markets. Building on organisational and sociological theories of rituals, as well as drawing empirically from a longitudinal qualitative interview study of a cohort of students in Swedish higher vocational education for work in digital data strategy, I explore how rituals are enacted in a vocational education and training setting and what these rituals mean to the aspirants who partake in them.

The findings illustrate how rituals initiate, convert, and locate the participants in a team. These repeated encounters with rituals socialise, cultivate and build vocational faith amongst participants, despite the nascency and unstable nature of their education-to-work pathways. However, while rituals can serve as a catalyst to ignite processes of collective identification and vocational socialisation, they are not always successful. The paper discusses implications of faith-building in weak-form occupational pathways when the labour market is strong and conversely, when the economy is in recession. The text concludes by advocating the need for examining the power of educational institutions in shaping transitional experiences of participants in vocational education.

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In order to develop deeper understandings of elite integration and pathways to power, scholars in the fields of sociology of education and professions have highlighted the need for research to examine the role of knowledge content in the educational backgrounds of governing elites. Complexity around governance due to multifaceted challenges posed by global health crises, demographic changes and climate change, has intensified this need. Through descriptive analyses of forty years of annual reporting data of Singapore's public service commission, this article examines institutional stability and change in a national scholarship programme from a historical and sociological perspective. The findings illustrate modifications in the valorisation of knowledge acquired by future governing elites over time, with changes marked out by historical periods relating to nation-building, legitimising the elite, and attempts to 'diversifying' the elite. These findings provide insights on a specific case of state-sponsored mobility, while presenting implications for the role of travelling scholarships in facilitating the acquisition of knowledge, as local elites are schooled for governmental work. The text concludes with questions about how systems of sponsored mobility, built on transnational aspirations, might be reshaped due to current disruptions to international student mobility.

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Drawing on pragmatic and occupational sociology, this paper examines how individuals in Sweden embark on occupations that are in nascent stage and for work tasks that are weakly defined. I accompanied a group of aspirants as they moved from a higher vocational education programme into the labour market, following their learning journeys towards emerging occupational roles. The present paper focuses on how they face reality tests related to their unclear occupational futures and the navigation of ethical grey zones when in the labour market. These tests occur in transition from education to work, and particularly for emerging occupations, due to the uncertain and fragile logics that surround new work tasks; in this case, offering digital data services. Through encountering these tests, aspirants are offered the opportunity to negotiate and develop moral competence, although they vary in their coping strategies. The findings of this analysis set out to contribute to the literature on how individuals are prepared for emerging occupations and propose the concept of 'weak-form occupations' as a means to characterise and examine education to work pathways that are less intuitive or predictable.

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