Vocational education

Vocational education or Vocational Education and Training, also called Career and Technical Education, prepares learners for jobs that are based in manual or practical activities, traditionally non-academic and totally related to a specific trade, occupation or vocation, hence the term, in which the learner participates.

It is sometimes referred to as technical education, as the learner directly develops expertise in a particular group of techniques or technology. Generally, vocation and career are used interchangeably. Vocational education might be classified as teaching procedural knowledge.

This may be contrasted with declarative knowledge, as used in education in a usually broader scientific field, which might concentrate on theory and abstract conceptual knowledge, characteristic of tertiary education. Vocational education can be at the secondary or post-secondary level and can interact with the apprenticeship system. 

Increasingly, vocational education can be recognized in terms of recognition of prior learning and partial academic credit towards tertiary, it is rarely considered in its own form to fall under the traditional definition of a higher education. Up until the end of the twentieth century, vocational education focused on specific trades classes.