The selection and cultivation of technical and skilled talents is a globally concern in the vocational education sectors. Establishing a compatible examination and enrollment system serves as the cornerstone for driving the high-quality development of modern vocational education. Against the backdrop of accelerating global vocational education reform, China’s higher vocational education examination and enrollment system, as the core mechanism for selecting technically skilled talents, exhibits significant diversity in its provincial-level practices. However, existing research predominantly focuses on national policy frameworks, lacking systematic investigation into the institutional design and implementation pathways undertaken by provincial administrative entities. Guided by systems theory, this study explores the reform of China’s higher vocational education examination and enrollment system in the new era. It constructs an analytical framework of “value objectives--organizational structure--institutional content--operational mechanisms”, employing a comprehensive methodology that includes policy text analysis, empirical research, and interviews. Taking Shandong Province as a case study reveals that the higher vocational education examination and enrollment system has undergone a transformation: shifting from a focus on stream selection to cultivating technically skilled talents, and evolving from fragmented pilots to a model featuring three parallel enrollment types. Reforms in institutional content have resulted in a dual-track college entrance examination system embodying the selection characteristics of distinct education types and have promoted a ministry-province co-construction coordination mechanism. Guided by systems theory, the reform of China’s higher vocational education examination and enrollment system needs to follow a value orientation transition from a selection tool to a hub of industry-education integration, design a system based on collaborative reforms nationwide, focus on the dynamic balance between standardization and differentiation in institutional content reform, and implement the system from local pilot projects to national governance. By revealing the systematic path of provincial-level higher vocational education examination and enrollment system reform, we aim to enrich the theoretical connotation of the higher vocational education examination and enrollment system, extract an implementation plan of “national coordination and provincial promotion”, and promote the development of vocational education from “typification” to “ecosystem”.