In the decades after the Second World War, there were in all the Nordic countries established education for health care workers, located between the professional nurses and the unskilled health care assistants. These educations were organised autonomously of the education systems in general, and of other voca-tional educations. The occupational categories that was formed in the Nordic countries have developed differently concerning recruitment patterns, education, position in the field of work, esteem, and collec-tive organisation. A common challenge is that demographic changes seems to make it hard to recruit enough skilled health care workers to keep the public services in care and nursing at todays’ level. The comparative study of the health care worker occupations in the Nordic countries is part of the Nord-VET project and aims at increasing the understanding of similarities and differences across the countries in how the occupation and the education have developed, how the care worker educations gradually have been integrated into the national VET-systems through different reforms, and thus also strengthen the understanding of the different VET-systems.

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