This book has quite a long history in its making as we have been collaborating on research about young people and their individual pathways to adulthood since the mid-1980s. We began at a time when traditional heavy industry and manufacturing were giving way to competition and new industrial processes from the Far East and when youth unemployment was high. The aim was to compare education to employment transitions in the United Kingdom and Germany.

Our approach was to combine quantitative and qualitative methods in understanding differences in young people's experience between the two countries in making the transition from school to work. We concluded that the respective roles of institutions tailored to each country's vocational education and training (VET) arrangements, with deep cultural roots, was central to both establishing and maintaining the different pathways to adulthood. Such pathways also opened the door to understanding young people's aspirations and achievements together with the challenges that faced them in realising their goals. We wanted to learn what motivated the choices made and what demographic and cultural factors helped or hindered them.

Thirty years later, the global financial crisis and the ‘Great Recession’ that followed in 2008 became the stimulus for another collaborative project about the pathways to adulthood involving colleagues in the US as well as Europe. This time the aim was to elucidate the life course effects of the recession set against continuing economic and social trends in the context of accelerating demographic change.

Apart from continuities in the economy and society from then to now, the current book breaks quite new ground. This time our investigation extends to such new socio-economic effects as the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence, the gig economy and digitalisation as reflected in the transformations of everyday life and work brought about by the internet.

In a further step, we extended our interest to the potential unravelling of the European Union triggered by Britain's decision to leave – Brexit – and the impact this might have on young people in the UK and Germany and more widely across Europe. Hence, other themes of the book regarding young people's life course include the role of their political participation and family engagement through the internet.