International Encyclopedia of Education

Some young people experience difficulty making the transition from schooling to work. The magnitude of this effect varies between countries and is linked to the labor-market regulation and the design of national transition systems. Providing more vocational education and training (VET) opportunities…

[No abstract available]

Informal learning is by far the most prevalent form of adult learning, and offers benefits to all age groups and people, including older workers, migrant groups and refugees, and people who are disengaged from learning. It is also of great benefit to small business who lack the resources to formally…

The training market is a market-like mechanism through which many governments organize publicly financed training programs, such as training for unemployed young people. A range of providers, including for-profit training companies, compete for public contracts. Relative to public administration, th…

This article examines the nature of employability skills in the context of broader notions of generic skills, and the ways in which employability skills can be developed, assessed, and reported. The issues, which are similar in all developed countries, are illustrated primarily with examples from Au…

Apprenticeship is a tradition of training for work that usually includes work-based training, off-the-job training, and an employment relationship. This article discusses different ways of looking at apprenticeship and ways in which countries' models may vary. The article includes a case study of th…

[No abstract available]

Protracted armed conflict and violence leads to widespread destruction of already fragile education and training systems in developing countries and hampers their chances to participate in and benefit from globalization. Young people take up arms instead of learning employable skills. Once the confl…

A major policy goal for many governments in their vocational education and training (VET) systems is to make them more confident of employer facing. This article reviews the influence of business and industry on VET systems. The extent to which supporting structures facilitate or impede the effectiv…

First, some definitions, structural aspects, and varieties of apprenticeship are outlined. Second, different theoretical approaches to apprenticeship are emphasized - anthropological, philosophical, and psychological. Two dynamic perspectives on the dynamics of the learning process in apprenticeship…

This article analyzes issues such as the scope, scale, and coherence within technical and vocational education and training (TVET) and across different sectors within particular countries to demonstrate the complexity of TVET policy formulation. It is argued in the article that tensions between the …

Vocational teacher education is explored and distinguished from other forms of teacher education. The many varieties of vocational education, ranging from state controlled to market oriented, are deeply intertwined with national traditions and culture. Different admission requirements and a complex …

The main focus of this article is the dual system in Germany. The dual system here consists of a traditional pattern of skill formation which goes back to the medieval mode of apprenticeship training. This means that training is workplace-led and predominantly practical although there is a vocationa…

Competency-based approaches have dominated vocational-education systems in many countries in recent decades. The introduction of this approach has been justified by the desire of education to meet the needs of industry better - though many educationalists have been critical of this approach, assumin…

This article reviews lifelong learning policy models proposed by Green (2000), including market-led, state-led, and social-partnership-led approaches. Different policy initiatives and/or systems can be deemed to belong to one of three different models, although they may not correspond precisely. Thi…

Current social and economic imperatives are leading to workplaces being seen as important and necessary learning environments in their own right, rather than places to augment knowledge learned elsewhere. Frameworks for workplace learning can draw upon a long tradition of learning through practice t…

This article examines the issue of noncompletion in vocational education and training. It looks at how noncompletion is defined and at some of the different ways it is measured, presenting some estimates using recent OECD data. It then outlines some of the approaches to identifying causes of noncomp…