Alignment of vocational education curricula with job requirements in industrial sector: Analysis study

Abstract

Many technical and vocational education institutions suffer from weak outcomes represented in qualifying their graduates to keep pace with the requirements of the industrial sector, and the negative impact on employment rates. This research has presented a way to link the training programs and curricula with the requirements of the industrial sector for the category of technicians and plant operators. By verifying the announced technical requirements for the jobs of technicians and plant operators in industrial companies with the outputs of courses and training programs in technical and vocational education institutions, as an example of this in the Jubail Technical Institute. In this article, a sample of (50) job advertisements for jobs of technicians and plant operators were used in order to extract the most required important technical skills. For this purpose, several tools and methods were used, such as text mining using the program in https://voyant-tools.org, in addition to Excel. Critical to Quality Tree was also used to clarify the importance of the technical skills required by the industrial sector. In addition, the cause and effect matrix which was used to link and evaluate the impact of training courses on the required technical skills. The article reached specific results, including extracting three of the most important skills required and declared for jobs in the technicians and plant operators and linking them with the training courses in the training program for plant operators. The impact of each training course on the required skills in the labor market, which facilitates the work of developing training courses to keep pace with the continuous improvement in the requirements of the labor markets for skills of the announced jobs.