Shaping successful educational and occupational biographies is not just the individual's responsibility. Rather, it also requires education and employment systems that enable and foster the individual's development. This issue of BWP focuses on how education offerings and access to education can be designed, organised and shaped on a flexible and differentiated basis in various stages of life. Readers will also find relevant research projects and findings as well as concepts for practitioners. In this issue's editorial "Lifelong learning ─ wishful thinking and reality", BIBB President MANFRED KREMER examines why lifelong learning is still not a matter of course, despite the wealth of good ideas and examples that are available. Other articles in this issue revolve around how enterprises that do not provide in-company vocational training recruit skilled workers, around the selectivity and dysfunctionality of pre-vocational education, and around the question of how the German Qualifications Framework can contribute to the recognition of non-formal and informal learning.