Confident in skills, confined by labels: vocational identity formation in Chinese higher vocational education students

Drawing on qualitative interviews with 30 final-year students across six regions in China, this research applies and extends Fugate, Kinicki, and Ashforth’s (Citation2004) tripartite framework to analyse how students navigate the tension between skill-based confidence and credential-based devaluation. The study advances the concept of vocational identity distortion to capture a paradoxical subjective condition in which students simultaneously develop confidence in their practical competencies yet internalise society’s devaluation of their educational pathway. Students’ vocational aspirations remain bounded not by capability but by the perceived impossibility of upward mobility within a system that demands their labour whilst withholding full recognition of their credentials. The study contributes to global debates on vocational identity by offering a theoretically grounded, sociologically informed perspective from the world’s largest vocational education system and illuminates the limits of policy reform when unaccompanied by changes in labour market institutions, cultural valuation, and the political economy of skill recognition.