[Polarizing or reducing unequal participation opportunities? Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on adult vocational learning]

Abstract

Political and scientific discourses repeatedly emphasize the importance of lifelong learning in today's knowledge societies. At the same time, participation in vocational further education (VFE) is still socially stratified: mainly those adults profit who already bring with them better qualifications and more resources. The Corona pandemic has profoundly changed the supply with and the demand for further education in a short period of time, and it is not yet clear-and empirically not sufficiently investigated-how the pandemic has affected participation in VFE and what barriers and opportunities the crisis has brought for different groups of employees. We answer these questions empirically using data from NEPS Start Cohort 6 for a sample of adults, who participated in the NEPS surveys before and during the Corona crisis and were employed shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic. Our results show that the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany was associated with a moderate decline in participation in job-related courses and face-to-face events. The social, occupational, and workplace differences in these forms of participation, which were pronounced before the pandemic, also declined slightly in the wake of the crisis. We conclude that the pandemic has led to a decrease of social inequality of adult education, at least in its first and second wave.

Keywords: Adult education; Covid-19; Informal learning; Job-related further training; Matthew effects; Nonformal learning; Pandemic; Social inequality.