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This chapter discusses the changing and emerging characteristics of work, work practice and work requirements, and their consequences for vocational education. Changing patterns in work and working life are proposed as comprising: (1) the kind of work available; (ii) how individuals participate in work; (iii) what constitutes competence within that work; and (iv) those participating in work. The consequences for vocational education are systemic in terms of the kinds of occupations that need to be developed, variations in and complexity of work requirements, shifts in employer/employee relations, and the demographic shifts in those who will need to be supported by vocational education. The chapter examines these patterns of change to work and working life, and discusses policy and curriculum practice associated with each. Overall, it argues that the changes to work make it more demanding, and the frequency of change in work and how work is carried out demands careful, comprehensive and targeted preparation and on-going development. Moreover, with broader participation in the work force and longer working lives, the arrangement for this preparation and on-going development will need to be targeted, differentiated and sustained.

Published introduction.

The book from which this chapter is taken is indexed at TD/TNC 100.51. Individual chapters are indexed from TD/TNC 100.52 to TD/TNC 100.244. Show less

This report was presented to the Working Party on the Information Economy (WPIE) in December 2004. It provides an overview of information and communications technology (ICT) skills and employment across OECD economies and analyses some of the impacts on economic performance. It describes a new approach to identifying the diffusion of ICTs in the economy. Two measures of ICT-skilled employment are developed. The first is a narrow measure that uses occupational data to identify ICT specialists (e.g. programmers, software developers but also cable layers). The second is a broad measure that includes those who intensively use ICTs to perform their work (both basic and advanced intensive users), as well as the specialists. These measures are calculated for the economy as a whole and also by sector. The report provides a brief review of earlier attempts to identify the presence of ICTs in the economy and describes a new measurement approach developed for the 2004 ‘OECD information technology outlook’, which attempts to capture the diffusion of ICTs throughout the economy based on the degree of their actual use. The industry rankings based on the share of ICT-skilled employment in total employment are then compared to the results of other studies that classify industrial sectors on the basis of ICT usage. Some preliminary results from the analysis relating the ICT skills measures to productivity measures are presented. The report has expanded the analysis of ICT-skilled employment from the 2004 ‘OECD information technology outlook’ and extended it to include Canada. The analysis revealed that the narrow measure of ICT specialists followed a similar pattern across countries (European Union (EU)15, US, Canada and Australia), but that the trends for broad measure of ICT-intensive users and specialists diverged. The share of broad ICTskilled employment is increasing in the EU15, but decreasing in the US, Canada and Australia. The broad ICT-skilled employment measure was also analysed at the sectoral level. Findings reveal that many business services sectors have a very large share of ICT-skilled employment (e.g. computer and related services, financial intermediation services, and research and development), as well as certain manufacturing sectors (such as manufacturing of office machinery and computers). Personal services tended to have a relatively low share. Most sectors were found to have increased their share of ICT-skilled employment somewhat, particularly those that already had a relatively large share. Show less

The demand and supply of tertiary workers contribute to shaping their earnings advantage. The expansion of tertiary education has been accompanied by a decrease in the earnings advantage of tertiary-educated younger and older workers in many OECD and partner countries. Tertiary-educated workers reap the largest advantage in countries where few adults have completed tertiary education, such as Brazil, Costa Rica, Colombia and Mexico. Tertiary-educated workers with high literacy skills have considerably higher earnings than tertiary-educated workers with lower skills. Older tertiary-educated workers benefit from both their relative scarcity among their generation and their longer professional experience, resulting in a higher earning advantage than their younger counterparts. It is difficult to say whether younger tertiary educated workers will achieve the same earnings advantage over time that the older generation currently enjoys. However, a formal qualification is not the sole assurance of higher earnings: higher skills lead to positive financial outcomes across all educational attainment levels.

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The OECD annual report on jobs and employment in OECD countries reviews recent trends, policy developments, and prospects. The 2021 edition of the OECD Employment Outlook [available in VOCEDplus at TD/TNC 145.163] focusses on the labour market implications of the [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19 crisis. Country notes are available for Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

In some countries, employers used job retention programmes to cut hours while allowing workers to keep their pay and jobs; there, it is likely that the full impact of the pandemic is yet to be felt. In others, there have been unprecedented increases in unemployment, but many workers will return to their jobs (or to new ones) as economies re-open and activity picks up.

The initial impact of the COVID-19 crisis was relatively modest in Korea due to the fast and widespread campaign of test, tracking and tracing that contributed to contain the spread of the virus. The unemployment rate in Korea started to rise from 3.4 per cent in February 2020 and reached 5.4 per cent in January 2021 due to enhanced distancing measures at the end of 2020. After that, it gradually declined to 3.8 per cent by May 2021. In Korea, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a greater impact on vulnerable groups, such as non-regular workers and young people. In 2020, the number of temporary and daily workers decreased by 6.5 per cent and 7.1 per cent respectively, while the number of regular workers increased by 2.1 per cent. The employment rate for young people (aged 15-29) also fell in 2020 by 1.3 percentage points compared to the previous year, showing the largest decline among all age groups.

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This paper discusses theorising and empirical work which proposes that the dispositions underpinning cognitive activity need to become more central to deliberations about how individuals think about and engage in skilful vocational practice. Such activity has consequences for how and what is learnt, as well as individuals’ ongoing development. Having reviewed ideas about the dispositional underpinnings of skilful knowledge, the paper reports a study examining how individuals construct knowledge associated with their vocational practice. This study provides tentative findings about the source of dispositions and their role in vocational activity. The paper concludes by advancing some implications for instruction. Show less

There are growing expectations that tertiary education graduates will be ready for working life, that is, possessing the capacities to participate effectively in an occupational practice in a specific work situation. Yet, graduates are often unprepared to fulfil this expectation. In response, tertiary education increasingly includes workplace experiences (i.e., practicums, internships, and work placements). It is necessary to understand these experiences' efficacy and their optimisation to promote work-life readiness. Drawing on students' experiences of internships, this paper discusses what constitutes the value of internships in post-secondary diploma courses in Singapore.

A quantitative analysis of interview data identified the contributions afforded through these experiences in workplaces - students' intentional engagement, and their readiness for working life. Central here is how these contributions promote the development of the adaptability required for effective participation in contemporary working life. The analysis identifies challenges including students' adapting to new work environments, navigating workplace practices, and developing occupational capacities. Workplace supervisors' and host educational institutions' support suggests interns' adaptability can be enhanced by promoting the relations between the support they received, on the one hand, and their engagement with challenges during internships, on the other. These findings offer an understanding about the experiences and outcomes of interns' learning through workplaces and offer implications for supporting and augmenting transitions into working life.

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Impressive progress has been made in raising participation in early childhood education as well as tertiary educational attainment over the past 30 years. However, the inflow of poorly educated youth into the labour market is unusually heavy for a high-income country, largely on account of high drop-out rates in lower secondary education which, in turn, reflect one of the highest grade repetition rates in the OECD. The supply of workers with intermediate vocational skills is surprisingly low, despite the high return, in terms of labour market outcomes that these skills offer, even if they have recently deteriorated. There is room to raise learning outcomes up to the end of compulsory school, as measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), although, owing to a compressed distribution of such outcomes, the share of poorly performing pupils is not unusually large. While significant reforms have been undertaken to address these problems, more measures are needed to reduce grade repetition and raise education outcomes, by improving accountability of schools and school staff, as well as by raising school autonomy further than has already occurred. Vocational training needs to become more attractive. In tertiary education, few Spanish universities have attained a high level of international standing, and scope remains to improve the contribution tertiary attainment can make to gains in economic welfare, notably by reforming funding arrangements.

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Economic and cultural globalisation has ushered in a new era in higher education. Higher education was always more internationally open than most sectors because of its immersion in knowledge, which never showed much respect for juridical boundaries. In global knowledge economies, higher education institutions are more important than ever as mediums for a wide range of cross-border relationships and continuous global flows of people, information, knowledge, technologies, products and financial capital. Even as they share in the reinvention of the world around them, higher education institutions, and the policies that produce and support them, are also being reinvented. For the first time in history every research university is part of a single world-wide network and the world leaders in the field have an unprecedented global visibility and power. Research is more internationalised than before and the mobility of doctoral students and faculty has increased. The specifically global element in academic labour markets has gained weight, especially since the advent of global university rankings. This working paper explores the issues for national policy and for individual institutions. Part one provides an overview of globalisation and higher education and the global responses of national systems and individual institutions of higher education. Part two is focused on certain areas of policy with a strong multilateral dimension: Europeanisation, institutional rankings and typologies and cross-border mobility.

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The 2006 edition of ‘Education at a glance’ provides a current and comparable set of indicators on the performance of education systems and represents the consensus of professional thinking on how to measure the current state of education internationally. The indicators look at who participates in education, what is spent on it, how education systems operate and the results achieved. Indicators comprise a wide range of outcomes, from comparisons of student’s performance in key subject areas to the impact of education on earnings and on adults’ chances of employment. New material in this edition includes: further analysis of results of the 2003 survey of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), including student access to, and use of, ICT; analysis of the lowest performing students; the effects of family background on students’ performance and the way classes are organised in schools; trend data on tertiary qualifications, including projections for the year 2014; trend data on survival rates in tertiary education; the impact of demographic trends on education systems, as well as projections on expenditure for the year 2015; trend data on expected years of education; instruction time per subject for 9-to-14-year-olds; a picture of student mobility and the significance of internationalisation of higher education. The ExcelR spreadsheets used to create the tables and charts are available via the StatLinks printed in the book. The chapters are as follows: The output of educational institutions and the impact of learning; Financial and human resources invested in education; Access to education, participation and progression; The learning environment and organisation of schools. Included as appendices are: Characteristics of educational systems; Reference statistics; Sources, methods and technical notes. Show less

This brief paper notes that one-third of the population of OECD countries hold an upper secondary vocational education and training (VET) qualification as their highest educational attainment, and it is estimated that nearly half will graduate from a VET programme in their lifetime. However, keeping up with technology developments in industry can be a costly endeavour, although partnering with employers can help to spread the cost of VET programmes. While vocational qualifications offer young people a good chance of finding employment, they are sometimes seen as a second-class choice and limit their value in the labour market overall. Countries need to ensure their vocational programmes offer all students the basic skills they need in the labour market and in life, as well as the opportunity to progress on to tertiary education if they wish.

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