Employer Influence in Vocational Education and Training

Abstract

AbstractThe advent of the new ‘knowledge economy’ poses significant new challenges to vocational education and training systems in Europe. Firms are confronted simultaneously with two problems: the need to augment traditional occupational skills with the more general education workers increasingly need in order to keep pace with rapid technological change, while at the same time counteracting the drift on the part of youth away from vocational training towards more academic tracks. This chapter explores employer responses to this dilemma in Germany and Sweden. Germany’s firm-based vocational training system is heavily oriented towards the acquisition of practical vocational skills, leaving advanced firms in particular with deficits in the more general theoretical skills that are increasingly prominent in the new knowledge economy. Sweden’s school-based system, conversely, has traditionally been stronger in the provision of general education at the upper-secondary level, leaving manufacturing firms short of the more practical skills on which they continue to rely. Comparing these ‘contrasting contexts’, the chapter identifies a shared trend towards the growing involvement of employers in public educational institutions—in Germany at the level of higher education as a way of augmenting the country’s heavily practical VET with more theoretical content, and in Sweden at the upper-secondary level to inject a practical component into school-based training in order to strengthen the connection to local firms. In both cases, changes are occurring less through outright reform of traditional educational institutions and more in a process of institutional layering.