Participation in further education is a central success factor for economic growth and societal as well as individual development. This is especially true today because in most industrialized countries, labor markets and work processes are changing rapidly. Data on further education, however, show that not everybody participates and that different social groups participate to different degrees. Activities in continuous vocational education and training (CVET) are mainly differentiated as formal, non-formal and informal CVET, whereby further differences between offers of non-formal and informal CVET are seldom elaborated. Furthermore, reasons for participation or non-participation are often neglected. In this study, we therefore analyze and compare predictors for participation in both forms of CVET, namely, non-formal and informal. To learn more about the reasons for participation, we focus on the individual perspective of employees (invidual factors, job-related factors, and learning biography) and additionally integrate institutional characteristics (workplace and company-based characteristics). The results mainly show that non-formal CVET is still strongly influenced by institutional settings. In the case of informal CVET, on the other hand, the learning biography plays a central role.

Teacher competence is crucial for quality of teaching and learner achievement. Competency models and competence measurement are prevalent in domains such as the natural sciences and lacking in others. We conducted our research in the field of business and economics education by focusing on the accounting domain because it is key to a deep understanding of the economic context and the development of economics competence. To teach well, teachers require professional knowledge, which is mainly composed of content knowledge (CK), pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and pedagogical knowledge (PK). Our competence model comprises the cognitive component of professional knowledge and the noncognitive components of beliefs, self-efficacy, and self-regulation. To measure competence in competence of prospective teachers, we employed novel instruments to test for professional knowledge and beliefs as well as established ones to test for self-regulation and self-efficacy. The sample consists of 1,152 students at 24 German universities. The structure of the competence model was tested. Results suggest that professional competence in accounting has at least four distinct dimensions (CK, PCK, beliefs, and self-regulation aspects).

As teacher training plays a major role in the development of (prospective) teachers’ knowledge, differences between the professional knowledge of prospective teachers at Austrian and German universities were examined in the current study. The teacher training systems of business and economic education in both countries differ substantially regarding structure and content. The German system consists of two consecutive phases with different foci (university education with an emphasis on theories and domain-specific knowledge, followed by school-based practical training with the objective of acquiring practical experience). Thus, in Germany, opportunities to learn (OTL) mainly cover domain-specific knowledge with less focus on didactics and teaching experience. In contrast, Austrian universities offer an integrated approach that combines the two phases (i.e., theoretical input and practical teaching experiences are closely linked) at the university level.