In higher education, according to the premise that we support, the diffusion of the notions of professional skills and experience participate in a methodology of change which seeks to break away from previous systems of « modernization ». By promoting new game rules, public power endeavours to establish a hitherto unknown regularisation mechanism in the field of education, one which is based on the economic market and linked to that of the working world. The framework of this unprecedented standard can be seen in two major steps: the creation of innovative professional development tracks at the end of the 1980s and in the present decade, the introduction of VAE (accreditation of experience). It is in the light of this movement that we begin to detect the integration of professional skills and experience in the realm of higher education. When were the foundations of this public political policy laid and what criteria have been used to elaborate the different phases of its construction? To what has it been compared? Which social groups have legitimised it and which resist?