In the past two decades, the Hungarian vocational institutional system and its content were characterized by constant change, but the series of the reforms did not reach its aim after all.
While the participant of the economy may have counted on the well-trained workforce as the consequence of the development taking place in the training in the 90s, today we increasingly face criticism regarding the training and opinions criticizing the vocational erudition of graduated students.
School leavers, considering both their quality and quantity were found increasingly more distant from the special claim of the labour market. This resulted in manpower shortage at smallholder organizations and unemployment among career starters. As a consequence of expansion of the education, more and more students registered into an institution giving high school graduation, while the skilled worker career suffered considerable loss of prestige. The manual labour was depreciated in spite of the fact that the vocational training policy recognised the significance of the vocational training already at the beginning of 2000s. In some industries (construction, mechanical engineering), skills shortage emerged, while - including adult education - more people obtained qualification not required by the labor market, or left the school system without professional qualification.
The poor quality of the training and the simple methodological culture of the vocational teachers working in the vocational institutions play a considerable role in the development of the situation.
In our study we wish to present the research and its results, which intended to eliminate partly the methodological deficit. This paper presents the important stages, milestones of Hungarian vocational education as well as the directions of development ahead of us. We present the research, the hypothesis of which was that most of the professional teachers mainly use the "traditional" teacher-centered methods, is hardly familiar with innovative methodological solutions for the development, differentiation, or if they know them they generally do not apply them in practice.
We sum up the experience we have gained from the questionnaires and interviews with the target group among Dunaújváros College engineering teacher students and their colleagues in the vocational institutions.