Education + Training

About Education + Training

Education + Training — Profile and Guide

Education + Training (ET; print ISSN 0040-0912; online ISSN 1758-6127) is a long-established peer-reviewed journal published by Emerald Publishing in the United Kingdom, devoted to the relationships between education, training and employment. Its volume numbering tells its age at a glance: volume 45 appeared in 2003, the journal completed fifty volumes in 2008, volume 53 appeared in 2011, and volume 68 was appearing in 2026 — a continuous run that places its first volume in 1959 and makes it one of the oldest journals in the world still working its founding territory. That territory is specific. ET is not a general education journal and not a general management journal. In Emerald's own statement of its aims, the journal addresses the increasingly complex relationships between education, training and employment and the impact of those relationships on national and global labour markets; it gives specific consideration to young people and to how the transition from school or college to employment is achieved; and it follows how partnerships between the worlds of education and work continue to evolve. Around that core it covers vocationalism in learning, employability within the curriculum, and innovative themes and initiatives within vocational education and training. Its readers, again in the publisher's words, are policy makers, educators and academics across education, learning and skills development, enterprise and entrepreneurship education and training, induction and career development. This profile sets out the journal's history and editorial traditions — including its famous long-running special issues on vocational education and training in small firms — its official coverage list, its indexing and metrics with sources and years attached and disagreements between sources shown rather than smoothed over, its most-cited articles, and Emerald's submission and open access rules, so that a researcher can judge fit from evidence rather than from a ranking table alone.

At a Glance

History and Editorial Traditions

A journal that reaches volume 68 has necessarily been several journals in succession, and ET's editorial pages preserve the memory of its own changes unusually well. Its founding subject was the passage from education into work at a time when that passage, for most young people, meant leaving school at the minimum age for a job or an apprenticeship; as the decades moved the typical transition through further and higher education, graduate employment and repeated mid-career retraining, the journal widened with it. The 2003 editorial opening volume 45 is a good period document: the editor welcomed readers to the volume, restated that transition from formal sites of learning to work and employment is a fundamental feature of the journal's focus, worried in print about whether what is learnt at one stage of life is recognised by employers at the next, and introduced a number on competence and capability — the vocabulary of its field in that decade, preserved in amber. Five years later the journal marked its fiftieth volume and looked ahead to its fiftieth anniversary in 2008, with the editor inviting the editorial advisory board and friends of the journal to contribute reflections — a small ceremony that tells researchers the title's continuity is a point of institutional pride, not an accident of cataloguing.

The journal's most distinctive editorial tradition is its special issues on vocational education and training in small and medium-sized enterprises. The series began with a conversation at a vocational education and training conference in 1999 between the editor, Rick Holden, and the guest editor Harry Matlay, on the ground that education and training issues in smaller firms were under-represented in the specialist literature while large organisations absorbed most research attention. A United Kingdom-focused double issue followed in 2000, an international one in 2001 covering Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Australia, Taiwan and South Africa, and the series then ran annually as prestigious double special issues — the fourth in volume 45 (2003), the ninth by volume 50 (2008), and a sixteenth double special issue on enterprise and entrepreneurship education in a later volume, by then under editor Martin McCracken. The guest editor's own assessment, printed in the journal, was that the issues were used as teaching material in business schools across Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas and were reprinted in several languages. A directory profile rarely gets to say something this concrete about a journal's influence, but here the journal documented it itself: for two decades, ET functioned as the principal curated venue for research on learning in smaller firms, a sector that employs most of the workforce and was studied by few. Rick Holden's long editorship ended in 2010 — the volume 53, issue 1 editorial of October 2010 is its successor's first, written in the week of a spending review whose cuts to further and higher education the new editor immediately connected to the journal's subject matter — and the transition subject itself had by then expanded to lifelong reskilling, which the journal's current volumes continue to treat as central rather than peripheral.

Scope and Coverage — the Publisher's List

Emerald's statement of coverage, reproduced in the publisher's journal information, lists the subjects the journal covers: managing the transition from school or college to work; new initiatives in post-16 vocational education and training; education–business partnerships and collaboration; links between education and industry; the graduate labour market; work experience and placements; the recruitment, induction and development of school leavers and graduates; young person employability and career development; e-learning in further and higher education; research news; and reviews of recent publications. Read as a whole, the list describes a journal organised around a journey — from classroom to workplace, and through the institutions that are supposed to make that journey work — rather than around a school phase or a teaching method. That is why ET publishes higher-education researchers writing about graduate employability alongside further-education researchers writing about apprenticeships, and entrepreneurship educators alongside labour-market analysts: the unifying question is what education does to a person's prospects in work, and what work demands back from education. Current contents confirm the modern form of the same agenda: Emerald's 2026 listings for volume 68 include studies of postgraduate employability, of work-integrated learning placements and technical and vocational education students in China, of gender and internship perceptions among Czech secondary school students, and of teacher employment reform and professional identity in Türkiye — comparative, empirical, transition-focused work, exactly on the historic brief. Manuscripts that belong elsewhere include pure curriculum theory with no employment dimension, school-effectiveness studies that stop at examination results, and human-resource management papers in which training is an internal corporate process untouched by the education system; the journal's title is a scope statement, and both halves of it must be present.

Indexing and Metrics — Sources, Years and Disagreements Shown

Aggregator summaries of the official lists report the journal as indexed in Scopus, with coverage from 1959, and in the Social Sciences Citation Index of Web of Science, with a Scopus CiteScore of 7.5 in the compilation consulted. This profile reports those listings as aggregator-reported and repeats the standard advice: for any decision that depends on indexing — promotion, accreditation, a funder mandate — check Scopus's and Clarivate's own current source lists, which are the only authoritative versions.

The citation metrics require the same discipline, because the sources consulted for this profile genuinely disagree, and printing one number as the journal's impact factor would misrepresent the record. A Journal Citation Reports-based summary updated in June 2026 gives a latest impact factor of 2.6. A journal-metrics database computed from the 2025 data gives 4.270 for 2025, against 4.530 for 2024 and 4.781 for 2023, together with a SCImago Journal Rank of 0.728 for 2025 and an h-index of 95. A 2024 metrics compilation gives an impact factor of 3.20, a five-year figure of 3.50, an SJR of 0.76 and an h-index of 85, with SCImago quartile placements reported as first quartile in Education and second quartile in Business, Management and Accounting (miscellaneous) and in Life-span and Life-course Studies. These are not all measuring the same year or, in the database cases, necessarily the same underlying quantity, and the spread between 2.6 and 4.27 across sources and years is itself the finding a careful reader should take away: ET is a well-cited journal in its field by any of these reckonings — comfortably in the upper reaches of education and vocational-training titles — but the exact decimal belongs to a named source and year, and only the current Journal Citation Reports value, quoted from Clarivate, should be used where an exact official figure is required. What does not change between sources is the shape of the journal's citation history: its most-cited article, in the Research.com analysis of its record, is the paper titled The key to employability: developing a practical model of graduate employability, with about 634 citations in that analysis, followed by Entrepreneurship education and training — can entrepreneurship be taught? Part I, at about 578, and Entrepreneurship Education: Can Business Schools Meet the Challenge?, at about 495. That a model of graduate employability and two papers asking whether entrepreneurship can be taught head the list is the journal's intellectual biography in three titles.

Submitting to Education + Training

Emerald's rules, stated in its publication ethics and open research policies, define the practical terms for every Emerald journal including this one, and they protect authors in ways worth knowing. The only route of submission is the journal's own ScholarOne system reached through the Emerald website — never by email and never through a third-party agent, and Emerald reserves the right to reject work submitted by a third party on an author's behalf. The only occasion on which Emerald will ask an author for money is where the author has chosen the gold open access route; the article-processing charge is then payable once the paper has been accepted, and never at submission — so any payment demand arriving earlier, or from outside the Emerald system, should be treated as a scam and reported to Emerald support, a warning Emerald itself prints prominently. Authors who do not choose gold open access may use Emerald's green route: the author accepted manuscript may be deposited in an institutional repository, a non-profit subject repository or a personal or company website, under either the published copyright line or a CC BY-NC licence, with no embargo period imposed, although the deposited manuscript must not be made publicly accessible until the article's official publication on Emerald Insight, and Emerald does not currently allow sharing on ResearchGate or Academia.edu. For ET specifically, the fit checks before submission are the scope checks from the coverage list: name the transition, partnership or labour-market relationship the paper studies; state the population — school leavers, graduates, apprentices, employees in smaller firms, teachers in transition — precisely; and write the implications for the other side of the education–work boundary, since the journal's referees and readers sit on both sides of it. Article-processing amounts for the gold route are set by Emerald for the journal and change over time; the live figure is the one on Emerald's journal pages at the time of acceptance, and no amount is stated in this profile because none could be verified from an official ET-specific page fetched during its preparation — an honest blank, preferable to a copied figure of unknown date.

Is This Journal Right for Your Paper?

Education + Training is the right home when the paper's contribution is evidence or theory about how people move between learning and work, how institutions on either side of that boundary cooperate or fail to, or how employability and vocational capability are built — and when the author wants that paper read by the policy makers, educators and academics Emerald names as its audience, in a journal whose interest in the question is sixty volumes deep. Its special-issue tradition makes it additionally receptive to well-conceived themed collections, particularly where a theme connects to its historic strengths in vocational education and training, smaller firms and entrepreneurship education. It is the wrong home for work whose connection to employment is decorative, however strong the work is on its own educational terms. Judged on the evidence assembled here — continuous publication since 1959, current volume 68 in 2026, indexing in the major social-science services, citation standing in the top band of its field on every metric consulted, and an editorial identity documented in its own pages across six decades — ET remains what it has been since the beginning: the journal of the school-to-work transition, widened by history into the journal of learning and work across a whole career.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who publishes Education + Training? Emerald Publishing Limited, in the United Kingdom.

What are its ISSNs? Print ISSN 0040-0912 and online ISSN 1758-6127.

When was it founded? Its first volume appeared in 1959; it completed fifty volumes in 2008 and volume 68 was appearing in 2026.

What does it publish? Research on education, training and employment — school-to-work transition, vocational education and training, employability, education–business partnerships, the graduate labour market, work experience, and enterprise and entrepreneurship education, per Emerald's coverage statement.

What is its impact factor? Sources consulted for this profile report different values for different years — 2.6 in a June 2026 Journal Citation Reports-based summary, 4.270 for 2025 in a metrics database, 3.20 in a 2024 compilation. Quote only a figure with its source and year, and use Clarivate's current record for any official purpose.

Does Emerald charge to publish? Only on the gold open access route, and only after acceptance; submission is free, is made only through the journal's ScholarOne system, and any earlier payment demand is not from Emerald, per Emerald's own policy.

How the Journal Is Used — and a Note on Similar Titles

ET's dual citizenship in education and in management explains its pattern of use. In education faculties it is read for vocational education and training research, employability studies and transition research; in business schools it is shelved with the human resource development and entrepreneurship titles, where its small-firm learning research and its entrepreneurship education debates — crystallised in its two most-cited entrepreneurship papers, which between them ask whether entrepreneurship can be taught and whether business schools can meet that challenge — are standard reading. Policy readers form the third constituency Emerald names, and the journal's habit of printing research news and reviews alongside full papers serves them: a policy maker can track a debate in ET without reading the entire primary literature of two disciplines. For citation purposes the journal should be cited as Education + Training, with the plus sign retained, Emerald as publisher, print ISSN 0040-0912 or online ISSN 1758-6127, and the article DOI in the 10.1108 prefix. One confusion should be avoided in catalogues and reference lists: this Emerald journal is not the similarly named education-and-training titles published by other houses, nor the European Journal of Training and Development, which is a separate Emerald journal with its own ISSNs (2046-9012 and 2046-9020 in its records) and a human-resource-development remit. Checking the ISSN resolves every such case instantly, and is the check this profile recommends whenever the short title Education and Training appears without its publisher attached.