Introduction

In a 1984 report entitled Youth Unemployment in France: Recent Strategies, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, 1984) provides a detailed critique of the French vocational education and job training (VET) effort and the failure of that effort to address the problem of an increasingly segmented labor market. The report's authors laid blame for the foundering at the feet of the French educational system and its organizing principle:

Hence, the idea of apprenticeship or technical, vocational training at an early age was viewed as an obstacle to social status and upward mobility. Moreover, as the report goes on to state, manual training has been regarded as second-class training, of less value than intellectual training (OECD, 1984: 93). Examples of poor quality vocational training sites follow, complete with poignant descriptions of inadequate tools, broken equipment, meager supplies, and the scant workplace knowledge of instructors.

Since the publication of this report the French government has implemented a variety of programs and policies to blunt the problem of youth unemployment, including a number of measures designed to make vocational education more relevant for the work setting and more attractive to young people. Over 80 of these initiatives are listed by Murphy (2017) in his book Yearning to Labor: Youth Unemployment and Social Destiny in Urban France. A recent endeavor, ‘Les Campus des métiers et des qualifications’, concentrates actors from secondary and higher education, apprenticeship training centers, employers and research institutes who comprise an industrial sector or labor specialty; for example, food and agribusiness, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), and so on, to create smooth school-to-work transitions and workplace-based training.