Asian Journal of Education and Social Studies

Technical and vocational education and training at secondary level is under sustained pressure to incorporate artificial intelligence, immersive simulation, automation, robotics and related digital technologies into curricula organised around occupational skills. Policy discourse often treats such integration as self-evidently beneficial, yet the empirical basis for this assumption has not been critically consolidated for the secondary phase, where learners are younger, provision is largely school-based and resource constraints are acute. This critical narrative review examines how emerging technologies are being integrated into skills-based secondary vocational curricula, what the evidence shows about their effects on learning and transition outcomes, and which conditions shape implementation. Peer-reviewed studies and institutional reports published from 2011 onwards were identified through education-specific and multidisciplinary scholarly indexes, citation tracking and searches of intergovernmental sources, and were appraised for design adequacy, contextual relevance and outcome validity. The synthesis indicates that curricula are changing more slowly and more unevenly than forecasts of automation imply, and that curriculum documents tend to emphasise tool use over broader digital and occupational competence. Immersive and simulation-based technologies show the most consistent short-term benefits for cognitive and procedural outcomes, although these benefits shrink or disappear when comparison conditions are equally well designed, and greater realism or presence does not reliably translate into better learning. Evidence on learning factories, artificial intelligence and generative tools in secondary vocational settings remains largely descriptive, perception-based or developmental. Teacher digital competence, institutional support, infrastructure and links with workplaces appear to shape integration more strongly than the technologies themselves, while patterns by gender, disability, location and income suggest that technology-rich provision can reproduce rather than reduce inequality. Major unresolved questions concern transfer to authentic work, long-term labour-market returns, the balance between general and occupation-specific skills, and the governance of data-driven tools. The review proposes an integrative framework that separates supported from hypothesised relationships and argues that integration should be judged by its contribution to durable vocational competence rather than by technological novelty.