One of the distinctive features of European training and development traditions, as compared with those of the US is the relative strength of vocational education and training (VET). This is particularly true, for example, of germanophone countries and regions. VET, however, is seen by many proponents of HRD as being rather conservative, operating in a protected environment with the support of public funding and not open to meeting learning challenges in today's labour market. On the other hand, many VET researchers and commentators view the HRD tradition as addressing only the demands of the enterprise to the exclusion of wider societal needs. While VET addresses a public goal HRD has to do with private goals.This divide can be explained simply by pointing out that VET in general is more concerned with initial education and training while HRD deals with training for the more volatile labour market, dealing with the large section of the population who are already at work and struggling to keep up to date. However, this is an oversimplification of the situation within VET, as there is also a strong tradition of Continuing Vocational Training (CVT), which covers the same area as HRD. Any serious investigation of convergent and divergent trends in the European HRD Agenda must consider the relationship between HRD and VET traditions (Nyhan, 1999 and Nyhan et al., 2003). Questions must be addressed concerning the strengths and weaknesses of those traditions in shaping European working-life cultures (or civilisations of work) in the future. It is not satisfactory that they are seen, either on the one hand, to be incommensurable, locked into different disciplines (and university departments) with their own values and ways of perceiving reality, or, on the other hand, is it acceptable that they are grouped together in a vague way (as they often are) seen to be covering the same area, without submitting them to any detailed analysis. This paper argues that the promotion of greater synergy between European education, learning and development cultures is central to the attainment of European goals related to 'lifelong learning' (see European Commission Communications, 2001) and the creation of an advanced knowledge economy by 2010 (see conclusions of Lisbon EU Summit, 2000).At the present time, Europe is characterised by many different work and learning cultures based on national, disciplinary and sectoral traditions. The achievement of 'the European project' clearly is not about the creation of a unitary culture but rather a European multi-cultural framework. This entails making sense of (understanding) the origins of and relationship between the different industrial, vocational educational and HRD traditions in Europe and promoting dialogue between these traditions.This paper sets out to make an exploratory investigation of the relationship between the different learning cultures in Europe. It draws on a recent Cedefop project on 'the history of vocational education and training in Europe' (Hanf, forthcoming: Varsori, forthcoming), the work on European HRD (EHRD) led by Sabine Manning (http://www.b.shuttle.de/wifo/ehrd/=portal.htm) and other sources such as Trompenaar (1993), Hutton (2002), Nyhan et al. (2003) and Rasmussen and Rauner (1996).