- 1 - Penultimate draft Cite as: Walker, C. (2007) Navigating a "zombie" system: youth transitions from vocational education in post-Soviet Russia. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 26, (5), 513-531. Navigating a ‘zombie’ system: youth transitions from vocational education in post-Soviet Russia Charles Walker St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford 1 Abstract In recent years sociologists of youth have drawn attention to the growing disparity between the stated goals of education and labour market policies on the one hand, and the changing priorities, choices, and experiences of young people on the other (Rudd and Evans, 1998; Wyn and Dwyer, 2000). This article explores a similar disparity in the transitions of young people graduating from vocational training (IVET) colleges in post-Soviet Russia. While the IVET system continues to attempt to foster an ideal-type transition from school to work, with young people taking up placements in local industrial and agricultural enterprises, the quality of the jobs available to young people at the end of this transition has been vastly undermined by the collapse of the old Soviet economy. In this context, rather than following the transitions sponsored by their colleges, graduates of the IVET system are focused on the perceived opportunities available to them through the newly expanded further and higher education sectors. As in many Western countries, transitions from IVET colleges have thus become both ‘destandardised’ and ‘individualised’; the young people in the research were taking individual responsibility for their labour market prospects by pursuing prolonged periods of combined work and part-time study. In exploring their experiences of transitions through emerging educational structures, however, the article identifies familiar disadvantages rooted in social background. Keywords: youth transitions; vocational education; individualisation; destandardisation; Russian labour market; learning society Introduction In recent years sociologists of youth in Europe and the USA have pointed to the growing protraction and complexity of youth transitions to adulthood. With the contraction of youth labour markets and the expansion of post-secondary education, young people across the Western world face increasingly diverse sets of pathways upon leaving compulsory schooling. Rather than following the straightforward, ‘mass’ transitions of the post-war period, young people must negotiate a range of choices in the construction of increasingly ‘individualised’ and ‘destandardised’ routes into working lives. At the same time, the policies which attempt to structure the youth period, and the discourses of ‘transition’ which surround and underpin them, to a large extent continue to be rooted in the notion that young people may undergo a straightforward ‘integration’ into the labour market. In this context, attention has been drawn to the growing disparity between the stated goals of education and labour 1 Charles Walker holds a CEELBAS Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Social Inequality in Eastern Europe at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies and St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford.