News from frontline

In this article, we compare the professional education of teachers in Finland and China. Here, the education of the vocational teacher refers to the teaching training offered by the universities of the sciences applied in Finland and the highest education institutions in China.

Vocational schools, including superior secondary vocational institutions, as well as the universities of the applied sciences, provide students with occupation and education based on competition for their professional preparation before graduation. The graduates of these schools increase the creative capacity in the world of work, satisfy the demands of skillful talents in the industries, resolve the pressure of employment and improve the education and quality of the skills of the population.

In Finland, more than 270 professional high schools offer the education of 113 higher professionals. Students who learn in vocational schools can request the primary vocational certificate, conclude more than 50 categories, in order to apply to enter the universities of applied sciences and scientific universities to study more or look for a job after graduation (Sahlberg 2009). Compared to the scale of the Finnish vocational education system, the Chinese vocational education system, the largest in the world today, has contained almost 20,000 vocational schools and more than 30 million students (Meng 2013).