To understand, evaluate and enhance how vocational education and training (VET) contributes to individuals’ development ultimately requires appraising those contributions across their life courses. How VET assists and supports them through key transitions offers a means to appraise its contributions. Here, the concept of a personal curriculum is introduced and evoked to capture the worklife pathways individuals take and the contributions that VET can and should make. Drawing on a current project elaborating individuals’ worklife history it is found that three interdependent contributions arise: the person, educational provisions (widely defined) and those from ‘community’. The concept of personal curriculum and factors shaping are advanced here.