Vocational education and training - VET

In this whitepaper, you'll learn how:

1. Employee expectations for remote work have evolved as a result of COVID-19
2. The ideal manager of people profile shifts in a post COVID-19 world
3. Investments in digital learning and development, goal setting, and coaching and performance tools will generate strong returns in the post-pandemic works
4. COVID-19 will shift line items in your P&: related to your people practices
5. Employee communication and employer branding strategy rise in importance post COVID-19

The research presented here aims to assemble and organize all existing survey instruments in the VET context and to develop a comprehensive and validated questionnaire for dual VET that measures workplace characteristics (VET-LQI). For this purpose, 43 test instruments were identified and categorized using a qualitative meta-synthesis, and integrated into a general theoretical framework (Tynjälä 2013). The results of the meta-synthesis reveal diverse content areas as the current foci of VET quality research. The applicability of any existing survey is limited, as the majority of studies either focus on a small range of selected categories and/or do not report the validation results of their scales. Hence, a synthesized item pool was used. Short scales were extracted and tested in seven commercial training occupations in Germany, which covered all identified content areas of VET quality research.

Highlights
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In stark contrast to the Western experience, policy rationales for internationalization of higher education (IoHE) in Taiwan were taoriginally more related to non-economic considerations.

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The Taiwan case can be explained by the island’s nascent political openness. Local politics have heavy impacts on the development of IoHE, even in an era of globalization where market principles, performance metrics, and university autonomy are valued.

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The subsystem actors’orientation of national identity, which has a connection to their affiliation to political parties, has played a prominent part in driving and shaping IoHE policy in Taiwan.

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The influence of Taiwan’s inward-looking political climate is more apparent in policy rationales, than in policy strategies per se.

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The dynamics of the policy subsystem, in which actors often exploit IoHE as an instrument for various domestic purposes, are the key to explaining the features of IoHE policy in different country contexts

Digital skills are thought to be a key competence of the twenty-first century. With the rapid growth of internet and communication tool (ICT) usage among both students and teachers, cooperative (co-op) education programmes, like other educational institutions, face the challenge of integrating and supporting digital skill development. However, little is known about how these skills are developed prior to entering cooperative education programmes. Against this background, a sample of 893 freshers, ranging from vocational students to co-op students, were tested according to their digital skills. The analysis shows that co-op students have a higher level of competence than vocational students. In addition, we found that in our sample social background has no impact on digital competences. The results are discussed and classified in the context of the current state of research.

Certainly, the relationship between occupations and the standing of VET is profound and enduring. Over time, it has been the voices and sentiments of powerful others (e.g. aristocrats, theocrats, bureaucrats and academics) that have shaped the discourses about the standing of occupations and their preparation (Billett 2014). Almost all these sentiments have been developed through perspectives that fail to acknowledge the complexity of much of these occupational activities, nor an understanding of the requirements to develop the capacities to perform those tasks.

The analysis shows that co-op students have a higher level of competence than vocational students. In addition, we found that in our sample social background has no impact on digital competences. The results are discussed and classified in the context of the current state of research.

In this article, we reflect on how insights from the literature on career shocks can help us understand the career consequences of the pandemic and offer suggestions for future research in this area. In particular, we offer three “key lessons”.

In the Dutch educational system, different learning pathways to higher professional bachelor (or HBO) programmes have been created: the regular VET route, the general secondary education route, and continuing learning pathways (such as the Green Lyceum or GL) that combine characteristics of these two traditional routes and that are specifically designed for students who combine a relatively high cognitive level with an affinity for practical, vocation-oriented assignments. 

The links to the labour market and specifically to employers are a key challenge for sustaining apprenticeship systems, as well as for the task of researching them.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of a small experimental pilot addressed to foreign adolescents with low language skills and high dropout risk in lower secondary school in Turin, North-West Italy.

The Covid-19 pandemic crisis brings to the fore the imperative, irrespective of job, position, role and responsibilities, from an individual, collective and organisational perspective to invest, time, finances and other resources in ongoing professional learning and development (PLD).

Graduates are entering a sociotechnological world, with teaching and assessment needing to reflect that, by shifting from a ‘recall-on-paper’ to ‘do-it-for-real’. With increasing student numbers, it is not feasible to have staff-student ratios and round-the-clock availability required to provide instant feedback and ever-more interactive teaching sessions, so digital solutions are the only option. There is already growing comfort with using computers in formal assessment; however, more work is required to extend beyond performance indicators enabling digital assessments, to addressing how students apply their learning to relevant work-based scenarios. This opinion piece discusses the issues HE currently face to ensure students develop the employability skills that equip them to be proficient in the skills directly related to their degree subject but also transferable to other graduate careers. It raises possible solutions to current technological problems in developing more computer-based assessment, to enable academics to design assessments that develop the capabilities students need.

We show, theoretically and empirically, that the effects of technological change associated with automation and offshoring on the labor market can substantially deviate from standard neoclassical conclusions when search frictions hinder efficient assortative matching between firms with heterogeneous tasks and workers with heterogeneous skills.

This article reports results from a Learning study in which two university based researchers collaborate with a vocational teacher at an upper secondary vocational school. The analyses highlights concrete changes in the teacher’s teaching, and it is argued that the approach used in the study can lead to a development where we can find forms for teaching specific subject content within vocational education.