How can the change in work be managed? The answer in the debates about structural change in the 1960s was: with vocational training and retraining. In his study, Jan Kellershohn tells a new story of this promise, which is still attractive today. Contrary to what is often assumed, it turns out to be less of a triumphant advance of human capital and self-optimization. Using the example of training and retraining in the Ruhr area and in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, a previously ignored problem can be worked out, which, however, formed the core of the structural change debates: Are workers capable of education? The study shows that structural change is not a process. Structural change is an epistemic apparatus that first created the categories to determine its losers. The social figures of the learning disabled trainee and the older worker reveal that self-optimization is not a story of increasing demands in terms of economization, but a history of differences in progressive exclusions.