Skill Construction and Challenges of Professionalization in the Hungarian Home Care Market

Abstract

Precarious working conditions, low pay, and limited access to labor and social rights characterize market‐based home care globally. Alongside growing concerns about the exploitation of carers, calls for the professionalization of the sector have also intensified. However, qualifications and training in market‐based care services remain only loosely regulated. Drawing on Ortiga et al.’s (2021) concept of skill regimes and the literature on skills and professionalism in care, this article examines how a segmented informal care market shapes the construction of skills considered necessary for providing good care, and to what extent training initiatives support professionalization. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with care workers, family members, intermediaries, and training providers, as well as ethnographic fieldwork conducted through online and in‐person training programs. The findings show that the strong underregulation of the home care market has hindered the emergence of widely accepted professional standards, while similarly underregulated training programs often fail to support professional competency development and instead undermine the value of formal qualifications. The Hungarian case thus illustrates how a loosely regulated skill regime can contribute to both deprofessionalization and market segmentation.