This article addresses two main questions: do young people leaving vocational upper-secondary education make more successful transitions to employment than leavers from academic upper-secondary education, or than leavers from lower-secondary education? And does this ‘vocational effect’ vary systematically across countries? The article distinguishes two ideal types of transition system, based on the strength of linkages between vocational education and employment, and governed respectively by an ‘employment logic’ and by an ‘education logic’. The vocational effect is predicted to be stronger in systems governed by the employment logic. This prediction, together with other hypotheses based on the ideal types, is tested using school-leaver survey data for the Netherlands (representing the employment logic), Scotland (representing the education logic), and Ireland and Sweden (representing intermediate cases). The ideal types are broadly supported, subject to limitations of comparability of the data.