A Road Map to Vocational Education and Training in Industrialized Countries

Abstract

Young people have been among those most affected by the recent financial crisis. Vocational education and training (VET) is often viewed as the silver bullet for the youth joblessness problem. In this article, the authors provide a better understanding of VET in industrialized countries, proposing a typology with three types of vocational systems: 1) vocational and technical schools, 2) formal apprenticeships, and 3) dual apprenticeship systems that combine school training with a firm-based approach. They first describe the strengths and challenges of each system. They subsequently review the evidence of the effectiveness of VET versus general education and the relative effectiveness of the different VET systems. Results indicate that VET is a valued alternative beyond the core of general education and that the use of apprenticeships combined with institutional learning tends to be more effective than school-based VET.

The Effects of Youth Labor Market Reforms: Evidence from Italian Apprenticeships

“…The implementation of the apprenticeship regime in Europe has followed different routes (Eichhorst et al, 2015). In some countries such as France the apprenticeship is integrated into the educational system and focuses on theoretically-based training in schools and certificated institutions.…”

Vocational High School in Indonesia Facing ASEAN Economic Community (AEC)

“…Non-formal and informal employment education is conducted at the training center, community center, work training institute, work training course, and others. Vocational education is considered capable of answering the problems of labor and unemployment [11,12,13]. Evans [14] further states that vocational education is part of the educational system that prepares a person to be better able to work in one occupational group or one field of work than any other field of work.…”

Cross-National Deployment of “Graduate Jobs”: Analysis Using a New Indicator Based on High Skills Use

“…Not only HE systems, also national VET systems vary hugely, with consequences for the relative quality of university graduates compared to the closest substitutable educational level (Eichhorst et al, 2015). At least some of the high-level skills could be acquired through vocational and work-based learning routes.…”