Skills and training are key issues to improve local development, in the academic debate as well as in policy practice. This Special Issue focusses on vocational and professional education and training. These are activities relevant for business. They comprise technical and organisational skills and routines, social and self-competencies relevant to accomplish daily work tasks, and professional attitudes relevant for companies. Universities as sites of professional education play a role, as well as vocational schools and further public and private bodies.

The objective of this Special Issue is to generate critical knowledge about the impacts on regions, e.g., on parts of the population of a city, on apprentices in a peripheral area or on local actor networks. This call does not distinguish between ‘local’ or ‘regional’; still, it has its focus on the subnational level, which often is integrated in international economic and political networks. Hence, the view can comprise a multiscalar spatial perspective. Regional ‘development’ includes various dimensions, as economic growth, innovative capabilities, sustainable social change and ecological transition. The Special Issue calls for contributions dealing with regions of the Global South as well as of the Global North.

The call welcomes papers from a range of perspectives from around the world inspiried by, e.g., economic/labour/human/political geography, business education, and further disciplines as sociology, anthropology, political science etc. All contributions should comprise a theoretical contribution, a part on methods and sound empirical evidence. We welcome different (quantitative or qualitative) methods.

This special issue encourages contributions that contribute to these issues. Key questions include, for example, the following. 

• Local actors (networks), local skills and regional innovation (systems);
• Initial education and further training and their impacts on regions;
• Dual apprenticeship and regional development;
• Relevance of experiential, informal, tacit, applied, innovative skills for regional development;
• Multinational companies, local skill development and regional impacts;
• Global Production Networks / Global Value Chains, local knowledge bases and regional impacts;
• Policies of vocational/professional education and their impacts on regional development, incl. regional clusters;
• Regional skill formation systems and regional development.

The Special Issue shall be published in December 2021. Potential   contributors   should   submit   an   abstract   (of   no   more   than   500 words) to [email protected] by 24 February 2021 (flexibleee), and will be informed about the guest editors’ decision until 1st March 2021.

Full papers (5000-8000 Words, see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/14682419/homepage/forauthors.html) will be due for pre-submission to guest editors by 1st May 2021, and final submission by 1st June 2021.