In Society 5.0, Education 5.0 enables economic development with the resolution of social problems through advanced technologies and manages technological power appropriately in terms of a humanistic perspective. Education 5.0 is a future education model aiming to encourage student ownership to form a contemporary student-participatory curriculum with teacher mentoring. While STEM education as an Education 5.0 enabler is the key to realizing Industry 5.0 to personalize and rehumanize the manufacturing process, this paper will look at the need to better align secondary STEM education with Vocational and Professional Education and Training (VPET) initiative by transdisciplinary integration to facilitate Hong Kong better transiting to Industry 5.0. The objective is to examine the secondary STEM education development and its potential role and benefits of creating a foundation of transdisciplinary STEM secondary education in overcoming the current shortcomings of the vertical division of academic disciplines. It seeks to restore the VPET nature in the STEM scholarship and emanate from the secondary STEM curriculum renovations and transformations to tackle social and economic challenges, so the processes of STEM pedagogy will be changed significantly to adapt humanization empowerment by adjusting the methods and approaches to achieve new industrialization and help align with the call of Education 5.0 in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

In recent years, the Hong Kong government has implemented a number of new policies to revitalize the development of vocational education and training (VET), such as the rebranding of VET into vocational and professional education and Training (VPET) to cover the new addition of programmes up to the degree level providing a wide variety of specialized vocational skills as well as professional knowledge. On the other hand, VPET is also widely promoted at the secondary school level as outlined in the latest “Learning to learn 2+” curriculum by the Curriculum Development Council (CDC) and the Education Bureau (EDB). The document suggests that the recognition of VPET as a possible articulation pathway could be gradually established through various activities. At the junior secondary (JS) level, career-related experiences in Life-wide learning (LWL) will be one of the main channels for students to gain initial understanding of the society and workplace. If interested, students can also continue their exploration through the diverse available options at the senior secondary level (SS), for instance the selection of Applied Learning (ApL) as elective subjects, participation in Career-relatedexperiences in Other Learning Experiences (OLE) and the enrollment to the newly launched Vocational English Programme (VEP).Although the suggested planning in the promotion of VPET at the JS and SS level looks ideal, there seems to be a lack of understanding regarding the actual impact and effectiveness of these mentioned policies to the development of VPET, especially at the SS level when students have to make a high-stake choice for their future. Therefore, it is the main aim of this study to provide a systematic and critical review on how different VPET-related policies function as a whole in the promotion of VPET. This discussion in this study will mainly based on qualitative data collected from individual interview and focus group with the key stakeholders (e.g. students and teachers