Fostering Virtue through Education: Synergistic Cultivation of Professional Identity and Professional Sentiment among Vocational College Students

Vocational education in China has moved from expansion to a stage of high-quality development, and this shift has changed what is expected of vocational graduates. Technical competence alone is no longer sufficient: students are also expected to develop a stable professional identity and a durable professional sentiment, that is, an attachment to their occupation that carries with it responsibility, a sense of mission and ethical commitment. In research and in practice, however, these two dispositions are usually addressed separately, and vocational colleges often treat values education as an addition to professional formation rather than as an element of it. Adopting the perspective of fostering virtue through education (lide shuren), this paper develops an integrated account of professional identity and professional sentiment and proposes a framework for cultivating them in synergy. It argues that professional identity supplies the cognitive and normative foundation, professional sentiment supplies the affective and evaluative force, a sense of professional mission mediates between the two, and practice is the arena in which both are formed. On this basis, the paper identifies four persistent weaknesses in vocational colleges (shallow occupational cognition, values education detached from specialised teaching, fragmented practical training, and evaluation systems that reward skills over dispositions) and traces them to societal, familial, institutional and pedagogical sources. It then sets out three cultivation pathways, namely curriculum-based ideological and political education, structured practical training and a skills-oriented campus culture, together with four supporting mechanisms covering faculty development, evaluation reform, cross-disciplinary teaching and research, and college–enterprise–family collaboration. The framework offers vocational colleges a coherent basis for designing and evaluating moral education that is embedded in, rather than appended to, professional formation.