Demands on the scientific foundation of Swedish Vocational Teacher Education has led to a development project on academic competence at Dalarna University in 2018. The project contained two sub-projects; the construction of a matrix, to display the progression of students’academic competence; and the implementation of a series of seminars on VET research. This article presents the point of departure and the methods used, together with the results of mappings and analysis of four different aspects of academic competence. This inventory of features of academic competence in teacher education, evokes a wide range of questions onthe meaning and consequence of scientific foundation, the research-practice relationship and concrete questions concerning course content.