Results

Skill Matters: Curriculum updates and Labor Market Outcomes

Skills2Capabilities Working Paper No. 6.2 - December 2024

Ziyue Zhu, Didier Fouarge, Barbara Belfi, Melline Somers.

Trends like digitalization and the energy transition are major drivers of changes in the skill demands in the labor market. Ideally, education institutions should anticipate the labor market requirements for skills and provide students with appropriate skill sets. Vocational Education Training (VET) plays a crucial role in training students for practical roles and preparing them for these changes. This study targets Dutch middle-skilled VET graduates and investigates the labor market consequences of curriculum updates. From text descriptions of the curricula, we construct a measurement for the skills and identify the emerging patterns of skill supply in the Netherlands, differentiated by education programs. Adopting Staggered Difference in Difference and combining the skill indices with graduates’ survey and administrative microdata, we find that the updates mitigate the self-reported skill mismatches and positively correlate with the probability of employment and self-reported wages. This research sheds light on the contents and frequency of the curriculum updates in the Netherlands.

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Skills Formation Systems

Skills2Capabilities Working Paper No. 7.1 - December 2024

Dr Sally-Anne Barnes, Professor Jaana Kettunen, Hanna Pullinen.

This working paper draws together evidence on skills formation systems in seven countries. Case studies were undertaken in each country focused on VET and careers guidance and counselling. It explores, using qualitative scientific methods, the role of legislation, policy, strategy, resourcing, stakeholders and career guidance and counselling services in VET systems. The working paper starts to build an understanding of the relationships between policy and practice at national and regional levels in seven case study countries. It evidences how national VET systems are supported by those delivering support programmes and services.

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Effects of mismatch on inclusive growth and social justice report

Skills2Capabilities Working Paper No. 5.3 - December 2024

Pepka Boyadjieva, Petya Ilieva-Trichkova, Veneta Krasteva, Svetlana Alexandrova.

Deliverable 5.3. studies the associations between skills/educational mismatch and inclusive economic growth as well as perceptions of social justice. It is based on the understanding that skills/educational mismatch may have much broader effects than its economic ones. This is in line with the capability approach, which allows us to go beyond the economic and instrumental perspective towards skills formation and to consider other roles of skills/educational mismatch and how they differ in different socio-economic contexts. The report focuses on vertical educational mismatch (in its two forms – above and below) as a type of skills mismatch. The study relies on data from the European Social Survey 2018 and official statistical sources and has applied correlations and multilevel regression modelling. It is accompanied by a dataset, which contains the main indicators used in the study and their description.

Read the full paper here (pdf) Download dataset (xlsx)

Quantitative analysis report + data set: Understanding mismatches from the supply and demand side

Skills2Capabilities Working Paper No. 5.1 - December 2024

Liisa Martma.

Skill mismatches have far-reaching consequences at various levels, including reduced wages, lower job satisfaction, diminished employability, higher turnover, and challenges in adapting to technological changes. These mismatches may also exacerbate social inequalities and hinder economic growth. This report uses data from the 2014 European Skills and Jobs Survey to explore the dynamics of skill mismatches over time and the factors influencing transitions between different mismatch statuses. The analysis examines individual job choices and external constraints in creating mismatches, as well as how these mismatches can be resolved through job mobility, changes in job tasks, and workplace characteristics.

Read the full paper here (pdf) Download dataset (xlsx)

The responsiveness and proactiveness of VET – a comparative case study report of changes in VET on the occupational level

Skills2Capabilities Working Paper No. 3.2 - December 2024

Markus Roos Breines, Torgeir Nyen, Johan Røed Steen and Terence Hogarth.

How VET interacts with a work field is a key question for both VET policy and skills policy at large. Responsiveness of VET content to skill demands in the work field needs to be balanced against a proactive approach, where learners are provided with a broad range of skills, a solid knowledge base, and/or skills believed to be in demand in the future. There is a key distinction between countries that have feedback mechanisms to adjust VET content rapidly to employer demands and countries where VET change more slowly through state-led or social-partner led processes. While the former countries run the risk of becoming too focused on short-term needs, the latter countries may be slow to react. This cross-country study of change in VET content on the occupational level in four occupations shows empirical evidence of the above. In general, state- or social-partner led systems change more slowly than employer-led systems. However, there are also substantial occupational differences. In the industrial mechanic occupation for instance, Germany, with a social partner-led process have shown clear ability to reform VET content, while England, with a more rapid feedback mechanism, seems to have been able to both implement new technologies and keep a degree of consistency despite the many changes in the overall VET system. The study also shows that introducing a greater degree of flexibility for firms to specialise training within a given national standard/curriculum has been a key response to adapt to change and heterogeneity across different types of VET systems.

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Comparative Report on Skills Strategies

Skills2Capabilities Working Paper No. 2.3 - December 2024

Daniel Unterweger, Eva Steinheimer.

Education and skills have the potential to improve both economic performance and societal well-being, while tackling overarching challenges such as the twin digital and green transition. To realise this potential, an increasing share of countries have used strategic policy documents in the area of skills policy, colloquially called „skills strategies“. However, despite this prominence, systematic approaches for comparing skills strategies and their implementation across countries are scarce. In this report, we conduct a comparative analysis building on in-depth case studies of strategic policy documents on skills in five countries: Austria, Bulgaria, England (UK), Germany, and Norway. We identify the strategies’ main benefits for the countries' skills systems and interrelatedly the effectiveness of their specific policy measures, as well as frequent barriers for implementation and the central success factors of such strategies. The study shows that skills strategies which are encompassing the preferences of broader groups of stakeholders, adaptable to changing circumstances and internally consistent are particularly well suited to mitigate potential barriers for implementation. The analysis suggests that while skills strategies can trigger incremental, gradual institutional change by building foundations for policy coordination, reinforcing policy priorities and improving complementarity between individual policy measures, their potential for bringing about outright, disruptive institutional change is limited.

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Report on Country Case Studies on Skills Programmes

Skills2Capabilities Working Paper No. 2.2 - December 2024

Daniel Unterweger, Svetlana Alexandrova, Tove Mogstad Aspøy, Pepka Boyadjieva, Philipp Grollmann, Günter Hefler, Terence Hogarth, Petya Ilieva-Trichkova, Veneta Krasteva, Chantal Marie Schumacher, Torgeir Nyen, Eva Steinheimer.

Education and skills are central for both economic performance and societal well-being, and for tackling overarching challenges as the twin digital and green transition. To realise this potential, an increasing share of countries have used strategic policy documents in the area of skills policy, colloquially called „skills strategies“. However, despite this importance, systematic approaches for analysing strategic policy documents and their implementation across countries are missing. In this report, we analyse specific skills policy instruments that have been implemented within the framework of strategic policy documents in 5 countries: Austria, Bulgaria, England (UK), Germany and Norway. We observe these instruments’ relevance, coherence with other instruments, effectiveness in reaching their goals, efficiency and sustainability. Thereby, we aim to show how individual policy instruments can benefit from being implemented as part of an overarching strategic policy document. The results of the case studies will feed into the comparative report D2.3.

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Skills2Capabilities Project Summary

Policy Brief 001

Emily Erickson, Didier Fourage, Terence Hogarth, Jörg Markowitsch, Torgeir Nyen, Daniel Unterweger, and Katarina Wessling

Skills and capabilities are central to individual, economic and societal performance and well-being. Skills2Capabilities is undertaking a series of interconnected research projects to better understand how skills systems need to develop if they are to better assist people in making labour market transitions – transitioning in and out of employment, between jobs or across employers or sectors. The project focuses particularly on vocational education and training (VET) and adult learning (AL) programmes which are an important mechanism for ensuring that the skills and capabilities of the workforce are adequate to meet the demands of the economy and the aspirations of workers.

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Framework for Assessing VET Systems

Skills2Capabilities Working Paper No. 3 - May 2024

Jörg Markowitsch, Tessa Pittrof, Anna-Lena Szumovski.

Since the mid-1990s, the expansion of the European Union and enhanced cooperation on education have significantly boosted comparative vocational education and training (VET) research in Europe, especially following the accession of Central and Eastern European countries. This growth has led to a demand for updated information, spurring numerous comparative studies, expanded databases, and new online tools. Various frameworks developed by transnational organizations like Cedefop, ETF, the European Commission, and the World Bank aim to assess and improve VET systems. This paper reviews existing frameworks for assessing the governance of vocational education and training (VET) systems and presents a new framework that better balances social, economic and educational goals aiming at combining ideas of the human capital with the human capabilities approach. The deliverable presents the steps taken to develop the framework, explains how it will be used for country comparison and presents some preliminary results.

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Country Case Studies on Skills Strategies

Skills2Capabilities Working Paper No. 2 - April 2024

Daniel Unterweger, Jörg Markowitsch, With Case Studies By Svetlana Alexandrova, Pepka Boyadjieva, Giorgio Brunello, Clementina Crocè, Philipp Grollmann, Günter Hefler, Terence Hogarth, Petya Ilieva-Trichkova, Veneta Krasteva, Tove Mogstad Aspøy, Daniel Neff, Torgeir Nyen, Lorenzo Rocco, Eva Steinheimer.

Education and skills are central for both economic performance and societal well-being. This insight has been increasingly addressed by policy-makers on national and European level. In order to address these overarching challenges, an increasing share of countries have used strategic policy documents in the area of skills policy. However, the overall goals and orientation of different strategies and their proposed actions can vary substantially. Policy-making in industrialized economies has long focused on the benefits of acquiring skills for realizing prospective economic returns via access to well-paid jobs, but the importance of skills for a wider range of social and human/personal development aspects has in part also been taken up by policy-making. The tensions between such different orientations and goals raise questions about the degree of comprehensiveness of skills strategies. In this paper, we set out our analytical framework for analysing skills strategies as well as our empirical approach, and present our analysis of strategic policy documents on skills at the hand of 6 country case studies, capturing the strategic document’s main foci, their comprehensiveness and the extent of their implementation.

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On the Effectiveness of School – Work Alternation Programmes in Italian High Schools

Skills2Capabilities Working Paper No. 1 - December 2023

Marco Bertoni, Giorgio Brunello, Clementina Crocè and Lorenzo Rocco; University of Padua

In 2015, school-work alternation programmes were made compulsory in all Italian high schools, with the aim of enabling students to combine theoretical learning at school with more practical experience.

A distinctive feature of this reform was that the intensity of school-work alternation varied across school tracks, being higher for professional and technical schools and lower for academic schools. In addition, the type of practical learning also varied, with students in technical and professional schools having more opportunities to learn in firms. Using a difference–in–differences approach, we show that students who participated in more hours of school-work alternation experienced a significant increase in the probability of employment during the three quarters following high school graduation.

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