Marja-Leena Stenstrom ¨ and Pai ¨ vi Tynjal ¨ a ¨ Changing Working Life as a Challenge to Education Recentmacro-level trends, such as economic globalisation, the development of the- formation society, changes in methods of production and the organisation of work, and the growing significance of knowledge as a factor of production, have created a new context for the relationship between education and working life. In this new context, the use of work experience as an educational and learning strategy has become one of the most important developments both invocational education and training(VET) and in higher education. Although the tradition of making work an integral part of education has varied at different levels of the educational system, the challenges that systems of education currently face are very similar in many respects. These include the challenge of equivalence as regards the level of academic standards, the challenge ofdeveloping pedagogical practices for different forms of work-relatedlearning,and the impact that work-related learning has on the identity of the educational orga- sation, the teacher, and the learner. The diversity of the systems through which work experience is realised, the varying levels of training of workplace trainers, and the lack of industrial experience of vocational school teachers have aroused discussion about how to guarantee and assess the quality of thelearningtakingplaceindifferent workplaces and of the work-based learning system as a whole. (See e. g. Boud & Solomon, 2001, p. 27; Griffiths & Guile, 2004; Guile &Griffiths, 2001. ) The key pedagogical question regarding collaboration between education and work is how to build a—rm connection between theory and practice or abstract thinking and practical action – and between the development of general skills and specificvocational skills.