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Whether individuals choose occupations that teach general or specific skills can have important implications on how protected they are from changing conditions on the labor market. This paper looks at the impact of growing up in a region exposed to structural change caused by import competition on vocational occupation choices using longitudinal social security data for Germany. Results show that individuals enter more skill-specific occupations like manufacturing and less general occupations like services if exposed to higher local import competition. Lifetime earnings are adversely affected, which can be attributed to vocational occupation choices.

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This article appears in Chapter 1 - Transforming, which deals with various concepts of leadership in the context of technician education and training (TET). The author discusses the needs and merits of cooperation among TET professionals and suggests strategies to promote collaboration between TET institutions. He lists some of the benefits of resource sharing at a time when TET is seen by some as an expensive investment. These include the pooling of expertise, reducing duplication of effort, generating goodwill by working together instead of competing, building unity with one voice for the TET sector, benchmarking quality standards and providing opportunities for TET staff and students to gain wider experience. Various strategies are outlined and the author concludes with a plea for people to take leadership roles, begin bridging the gaps and bring the sector into the 21st century.

The volume of collected papers is indexed at TD/IRD 88.87. Show less

Whereas there are recent papers on the effect of robot adoption on employment and wages, there is no evidence on how robots affect non-monetary working conditions. We explore the impact of robot adoption on several domains of non-monetary working conditions in Europe over the period 1995-2005 combining information from the World Robotics Survey and the European Working Conditions Survey. In order to deal with the possible endogeneity of robot deployment, we employ an instrumental variables strategy, using the robot exposure by sector in other developed countries as an instrument. Our results indicate that robotization has a negative impact on the quality of work in the dimension of work intensity and no relevant impact on the domains of physical environment or skills and discretion.

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This article appears in Chapter 3 - Boundaryless TET, which presents different approaches to aspects of technician education and training (TET) which might lend themselves to adaptation or adoption in other places or cultures. Its purpose is to explain the significant changes to education in New Zealand begun in 1990 with the establishment of the Education and Training Support Agency and, in particular, the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA). The NZQA was given a mandate to simplify qualifications for secondary school, post-school education and training so that they had a relationship to each other in a way that was understandable to all students and the public. Doyle explains the context of the changes and the regulatory environment. He describes the situation prior to 1990 and then looks at the policy and the theory of the National Qualifications Framework (NQF). The range and scope of the NQF is explained and its connection to the Industry Training Act and Industry Training Organisations (ITOs). Finally, he presents the debate that has since arisen on the value of the NZQA approach to competency-based qualifications as against the level of support from industry. He describes the policy changes of 1996 as a compromise which slowed down the development of the NQF but he concludes that with the end of the ideological debate it should be possible to implement a sensible national framework which is true to the original intention.

The volume of collected papers is indexed at TD/IRD 88.87. Show less

Studies of innovation are giving increasing attention to the relationships that businesses maintain with different participants in the innovation process. It is generally assumed that interaction with other businesses, universities and government organizations can generate knowledge that will improve the ability to innovate. However, there is little evidence of the specific roles that businesses assign to partners with regard to the provision of knowledge for innovation activities. This paper presents results from research on the dynamics of Triple Helix networks, where such networks provide the basis for building innovation capacity for businesses in catch-up geographical regions. The principal assumption is that businesses adopting an open collaboration strategy have a greater capacity to combine knowledge from different sources and adapt the knowledge to suit their innovation processes. A large set of key indicators is used to identify which regional sources are considered by businesses to be important for acquiring knowledge. The study is based on a survey of 737 businesses in the Andalusia region of Southern Spain and analysis of the results provides a typology of businesses characterized by the extent to which they focus their interest on specific groups of participants in the innovation process. The conclusions highlight and compare the role of universities with that of business networks, service providers, government and other sources.

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