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While the structural changes that have taken place in the labour markets of the industrialised world over the past decades are well documented, less is known about how individuals respond to this changing environment. This includes the extent of intersectoral mobility during the work career, skill differentials in mobility, the impact of the type of training on mobility and changes in mobility patterns over a long period of time. Against this backdrop, the purpose of this paper is to examine intersectoral labour mobility during the first 15 years of working careers in Sweden and West Germany. The analyses show that individuals in both countries tend to move away from industry into other sectors during their careers, but that this tendency is rather weak. While there are some mobility differences among educational categories, the differences between transition probabilities of German apprentices and Swedish vocational school students are insignificant. In the face of the massive transformation of employment structures, the importance of variation in the curricula is probably minuscule.

This special issue of the International Journal of Manpower aims to make a contribution to broadening our limited understanding of the role and impact of employer‐provided training for low‐skilled service sector workers. It brings together seven of the papers that were presented at the international conference “Adapting Education and Training for the Enhancement of Low‐Skilled Jobs” held at Helsinki in May 2002. The papers are situated at the crossroads where three different strands of research and policymaking meet: the training of the low skilled, the system of vocational training and the role of training for the service sector. The contributions cover an interesting variety of European countries: Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Spain and the UK, with diverging levels of low‐skilled (un)employment, vocational training and service‐sector employment.

Interpretive research in management accounting and control provides rich insights from empirically based studies, but it has been criticised for lacking generalisability and potential subjectivity. On the latter, triangulation is useful, and this paper aims to offer some insights on a triangulation technique thus far not commonly reported in management accounting/control research.

Drawing on a study of the roles of management accountants in performance management systems, this paper offers some insights from empirical experiences on the use of concept maps as a tool to assist triangulation and improve understanding of complex empirical phenomena.

The concept maps as utilised revealed additional insights which were not recounted by interviewees during the normal interview time. This is a potentially important finding for consideration of future researchers.

In this paper, how concept maps were used is detailed, and it is hoped that future researchers will find their use beneficial in interview settings.

Thus far, concept maps seem under-utilised in management accounting and control research. This paper gives some initial insights on how they may be used in case study settings.