Results

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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