One has to consider that reforms in VET systems of transition countries are much more complicated than that in EU member countries. In my presentation I am explaining some of the reasons and manifestations of systemic problems in the transition context. I am arguing that weakness of coherent reform strategy may result in strengthen the inherent structural problems.

In the transition process in Estonia the extreme neo-liberal "schock theraphy" concept has been implemented. Rapid and abrupt transition from one societal system to completely different one resulted in transition process, which has been extremely irregular and full of big contradictions, which have been manifested also in VET relations with its contexts resulted in lack of cohesion between VET system and the economic, labour market, social-political, education and knowledge and other elements of the context of VET.

The different problems caused partly because of inherited patterns of relations of VET with other systems date back at least to soviet time, partly emerged due to double transition processes. From one side, the transition process started at the end of 1980s was systemic by its nature, resulted in complete discontinuity of many trends, especially those closely related with political and economic systems. Opening of socialist societies to the rest of the world, at the same time, meant that these societies were facing all factors of global transition too. In Estonia, relying on analyse of labour market trends, we can say that the influence of the systemic transition on labour market main trends was dominating up to 1995, followed by further structural adjustment to changing global context. Virtually all people have been forced to change workplaces (repeatedly) during the 5-7 years, moving from agriculture and industry to the service sector and changing radically their professions or occupations.

There are some tendencies, characteristic to the VET reform process in Estonia, causing inconsistency, systemic and structural problems:

• weakness of strategic planning of VET. The first strategic plan for VET has been worked out in the late stage of transition - only just in 1997, being provoked by the external aid programs (i.e Phare). It meant that during the 90s in the Estonian VET system innovative ideas have been used pretty casually and largely "from bottom to top", being dependent on the initiative of people in better-performing schools and regions.
• tendency to borrow political tools and strategies from different European countries or use different VET systems for benchmarking without social-economic analyses and anticipation of the consequences of implementation.

Having been integrated into the Soviet economic system, a huge industrial construct, the VET system operated typically like a dual model. There were strong links between enterprises and vocational schools, the school leavers were guaranteed a job together with different social guarantees. This was actually a dead end for the most in terms of professional, but predominantly for educational mobility. Or in other words, while being integrated one by one with the economy, VET was not integrated with the rest of the education system. The problem still exists having been even stronger because of the strong demand for life long learning. The problem of integration of initial VET system, especially at post-basic level, with the life long learning processes is not fully recognised yet. This seems to be a major factor responsible for the low prestige of vocational education and training, especially in the face of the present-day massive expansion of education and the traditionally high educational endeavours of Estonian society.

There is certainly problem of systemic nature of VET - economy / labour market connection, although this problem is well recognised. Education and training system in Estonia today is characterised by high degree of standardisation and differentiation. At the same time the school-to-work linkage is de-coupled with weak labour market signals*. It means that there is a dissonance between education & training and labour market systems as far as regulated education & training system contradicts to functioning of unregulated labour market. Many experts try take benchmarks from German system by strenghtening standardisation and regulation in VET applying system of vocational standards and qualifications for modular curricula design. This might make the contradiction even stronger. At the same time, there is prevalent tendency of "one-sided" conceptualisation of this process (reforming the VET system to follow strongly the demands of labour market / economy) ignoring the cultural factors, activity of agencies in VET system and historical development of education context in general.