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In the 1950s, psychologists conducted numerous surveys of apprentices enrolled in apprenticeship centres. These psychologists, working with several research laboratories, used different methods (psychotechnical, statistical and clinical) to study a specific student population located partway between schools and workshops. By drawing a psychosociological portrait of this youth population, these psychologists investigated this form of adolescence in a working-class environment.

In the 1960s, the Young Christian Workers (YCW) conducted a series of surveys on the working conditions, training and vocational orientations of young people from working-class backgrounds. This paper highlights these surveys' contribution to understanding young people's relationship to work and training. In addition to the archives that allow us to understand how knowledge was built up, these surveys were conducted alongside militant activities that encouraged the young people to speak out. For working-class youth, their aspirations for further education were not yet focused on the baccalauréat, but rather on technical education, with expectations of gaining genuine vocational skills.

This paper discusses the life outside of work of young men living in workers' hostels ( foyers de jeunes travailleurs, or FJT), a form of accommodation that developed in the 1950s-1970s for young people who moved alone to the cities as part of the rural exodus. A wide range of conditions is examined by looking at: the Tours hostel, which was a working-class and male-only setting for young men about to begin their military service; FJTs in the Paris region, which took in older workers and technicians from high-tech industries who aspired to a middle-class lifestyle; and finally, the isolation of the Peugeot FJTs. These young people belonged to well-integrated fringes of society, and in the FJTs, they experienced a form of collective living that they had sometimes begun in boarding school. The young people seemed to accept the fairly flexible rules of living in the FJTs, but they viewed these places more as waiting areas than homes, providing them with a degree of residential comfort that was new in the 1950s, but more commonplace by the late 1960s.

Roubaix and Tourcoing, two emblematic cities of the textile industry in northern France, had a long history of hosting training institutions for factory supervisory staff. Beginning in the 1940s, however, local employers sought to promote part-time apprenticeships through apprenticeship centres run collectively by the companies and providing training in various textile trades. Prior to the 1971 legislation that aimed to revive apprenticeship in France, records of apprentices that have been preserved provide us with information on the careers of young girls who missed out on the broader educational and vocational prospects that were experienced by adolescents of the 1950s and 1960s. These records reveal the choices and decisions made by these young women, their families, guidance institutions and employers, as well as the judgements made about their training and professional integration, which were marked by professional standards and stereotypes about women's qualities.

This paper adopts a new perspective to look at the process of vocational training being formalised in schools. It focuses on the underlying generational conflicts of this process. From the 1950s to the 1970s, photography workers endeavoured to professionalise their occupation, which was traditionally self-taught but required the mastery of constantly changing technologies. Tension between young people and older photographers was exacerbated. What impact did age and diplomas have on this reshaping of professional value? How did young people react to the technical, pedagogical and ideological transformations that affected their training and working conditions? These were perceived differently depending on the generation, gender and social position. In this new era of certification, although on-the-job training and self-training still existed, diplomas gained ground and increasingly became a marker of differentiation between generations.

With the rise of the CAP ( certificat d'aptitude professionnelle), young people in the 1950s to 1970s had a new training option after their compulsory primary education: they could continue their education and specialise in a wide variety of trades. However, not everyone could pursue a CAP: there were strict prerequisites relating to family situation and primary school results, which had to be good because admission to the CAP was selective. The CAP definitely had long-lasting effects on the career paths of young people who earned it, with frequent intergenerational mobility, but these effects appear to have been stronger for men than for women. The CAP also helped farmers' children become wage earners and enabled some young women to remain in the labour market even after marriage and childbirth.