Firms' Knowledge Acquisition during Dual-Track VET: Which Sources Are Important for Innovation?

For 4 decades the impact of education on innovation has been subject to research. In search for determinants of innovation, researchers devote only scarce attention to vocational education - in contrast to academic education - as one on the main drivers of innovation. Yet, a growing literature highlights also the importance of vocational education for innovation, especially for those countries with a well-developed dual-track vocational education and training (VET) system such as Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. In these countries vocational education takes three to four years and combines vocational schooling with work place training in a host company. To ensure minimum standards, training is highly regulated by training curricula that are legally binding for all training firms.

Curricula in dual-track VET undergo a frequent updating procedure and thus receive constant inflow through a complex network of institutions that collect, process, and transfer knowledge across companies. Such training curricula regulate the content of training in schools and companies. While there are some minimum requirements companies have to fulfill, such as the acquiring of a training license for instructors, companies have some discretion on how they organize training internally. Companies can for example offer further education to apprentices during their apprenticeship or hire external experts who train apprentices. While companies differ in the internal organization of learning, research on why companies organize differently, what the potential innovative outcomes of certain learning arrangement are and which costs are associated with these arrangements remains a gap in the literature.

In this paper we draw on a classification of learning modes proposed by Jensen et al. (2007) to link learning in dual-track VET with knowledge processing and innovative output. These researchers define two ideal modes of learning, the DUI (Doing, Learning and Interacting) mode and the STI (Science, Technology and Innovation) mode, which explain innovative output of companies. The DUI mode consists informal processes of learning and experience-based know-how while the STI mode consists of the production and use of codified scientific and technical knowledge. While the forms of knowledge processing in each mode is idiosyncratic, we argue that learning in dual-track (VET) shares components of both ideal modes. For example, production-oriented learning, where an apprentice and an instructor work on a product jointly, may contain more components of the DUI mode than of the STI mode, because most of the knowledge is processed informally between apprentice and instructor.

The main contribution of our paper is threefold. We first classify types of learning according to the two ideal modes. In a second step we use novel German data from the 2012/2013 BIBB Cost-Benefit Survey (BIBB CBS) to identify configurations of learning types that innovative firms use and explain their internal mechanisms using the two modes of learning. This unique data set additionally allows us to calculate the training costs for each of the identified configurations. Finally, we plan to build a taxonomy of learning that explains how innovative firms organize their training.