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The Newsletter #DACUM Calendar 2024-2025 Subscribe to receive our free Newsletter For more information on DACUM Join our online community - Facebook https://web.facebook.com/cvaacfp - X @cva_acfp https://twitter.com/CVA_ACFP - LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/cva-acfp/ Become a member of the Canadian Vocational Association here https://cva-acfp.org/membership/
Skills development initiatives can help prevent conflict and strengthen peace in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. If designed or adapted appropriately, they can strengthen inclusive social dialogue and trust between groups and increase people’s sense of inclusion and their resilience to disruption and violence, through increased employability. Peace can be achieved by adopting peace and conflict analysis, conflict- and gender-sensitivity measures, a social dialogue- based approach, and a strong focus on fairness and inclusion.
This fact sheet provides metrics on how young Canadians move from largely compulsory secondary education, into and through their postsecondary experiences and finally onto the labour market. It brings together the latest indicators that can provide insight into these pathways.
The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2024 include 1,906 universities across 108 countries and regions.
The table is based on our new WUR 3.0 methodology, which includes 18 carefully calibrated performance indicators that measure an institution’s performance across five areas: teaching, research environment, research quality, industry, and international outlook.
This year’s ranking analysed more than 134 million citations across 16.5 million research publications and included survey responses from 68,402 scholars globally. Overall, we collected 411,789 datapoints from more than 2,673 institutions that submitted data.
Trusted worldwide by students, teachers, governments and industry experts, the 2024 league table reveals how the global higher education landscape is shifting.
View the World University Rankings 2024 methodology
The University of Oxford tops the ranking for the eighth year in a row, but others in the top five have seen shifts in their ranks. Stanford University moves up to second place, pushing Harvard University down to fourth.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) climbs up two places to third this year. The University of Cambridge slips to fifth place, after being in joint third place last year.
The highest new entry is Italy’s Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, ranked in the 301-350 bracket. However, the majority of the institutions joining the ranking for the first time this year are in Asia.
The US is the most-represented country overall, with 169 institutions, and also the most-represented in the top 200 (56). With 91 institutions, India is now the fourth most-represented nation, overtaking China (86).
Four countries enter the ranking for the first time – all of them in Europe. The addition of Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Armenia is in contrast to last year’s trend when all the new entrants were from Africa.
Stanford University leads the teaching pillar, while the universities of Oxford and Cambridge come top for research environment. The research quality pillar, which is the newly renamed citations pillar, sees MIT in first place.
The University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates scores highest in international outlook, while 28 institutions receive a top score of 100 for the industry pillar.
In addition to the 1,904 ranked institutions, a further 769 universities are listed with “reporter” status, meaning that they provided data but did not meet our eligibility criteria to receive a rank, and agreed to be displayed as a reporter in the final table.
Companies have recognized that skills-based practices are a powerful solution to challenges that have intensified since the pandemic. Employers have struggled to find the right candidates for important open positions and then keep the talent they hire. Through a skills-based approach, companies can boost the number and quality of applicants who apply to open positions and can assist workers to find more opportunities to advance internally, which can help employers improve retention. It also helps communities by creating more and better job opportunities for a broader, diverse pool of workers.
KEY INSIGHT #1
Supporting employers in overcoming structural barriers to training investment is key to addressing labour and skill shortages.
KEY INSIGHT #2
Ensuring that employers are actively engaged throughout the lifecycle of skills delivery projects, from inception to roll-out to evaluation, is central to the success of any training endeavor.
KEY INSIGHT #3
Well-resourced and trusted intermediary organizations that coordinate efforts among stakeholders can help alleviate employer capacity constraints, especially for SMEs, and improve program design.
After more than 50 years of research on drop-out from Vocational Education and Training (VET), databases provide vast amounts of drop-out studies from around the globe that entail hundreds of potential drop-out factors. However, many scholars tend to explore the topic without detailed and theoretically grounded foundation. Several diverging research foci exist within the research field of drop-out from VET: Studies differ with regard to the analysed phase of drop-out (development, decision-making, paths after dropping out), the applied sample perspective (learners, educators, further stakeholders), and the overall research perspective that is applied based on a specific theoretical approach. Given the range of drop-out factors, stakeholders, and possible theoretical approaches within studies, this article aims at organising the research on the multi-facetted phenomenon for future endeavours by presenting a framework model that comprises a three-step recommendation: First, the model illustrates different phases (Development-, Decision-, Adjustment-Phase) of drop-out research that should be differentiated. Second, it is argued that the chosen sample perspective is highly relevant for drop-out research and must be chosen carefully. Third, the overarching disciplinary research perspectives on drop-out from VET, which scholars may adopt within their research, entail particular relevant variables and focal points and should therefore be discussed. Four examples of research perspectives (economical, psychological, sociological, pedagogical) are briefly presented, structured on a micro-, meso- and macro-level, to exemplify different theoretical accesses to drop-out research. Throughout the article, the novel organisation framework is explained and exemplified by illustrating relevant aspects of each research area and exemplary literature. The presented framework will help organising the research field and enable scholars to delimit their work more precisely, leading to a more traceable structure of further research efforts and more significant contributions to the state of knowledge.
Trade unions are working against the clock to overcome the obstacles to achieving the 2030 Agenda and its sustainable development goals (SDGs). The UN reports are unanimous: the world is far from achieving the 2030 Agenda. Neither the funds made available nor the political action being taken are sufficient to deliver on the promise of building a better world that leaves no one behind.
While all 17 of the SDGs set out in the 2030 Agenda are equally important, SDG 8, focused on decent work and sustainable economic growth, is particularly important as it acts as a catalyst for progress on all the other SDGs, and especially the targets related to innovation, productive diversification and environmental sustainability.
The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) recognises and promotes the crucial role of goal 8, which is why it set up the Global Monitor on SDG 8. This tool, which assesses the status of goal 8 around the world, focuses on four key dimensions: economic well-being, job quality, labour vulnerability and labour rights.
In its 2023 edition, the SDG 8 Monitor assessed the situation in more than 150 countries, covering more than 98 per cent of the world’s population.
The results of this analysis, both by geographic region and by income group, reflect the range of challenges facing workers. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the workers are the worst affected by their countries’ poor performance on all four of the dimensions assessed by the SDG 8 Monitor. In the Asia Pacific region, progress towards SDG 8 is hampered in particular by the relentless attacks on labour rights, while in Latin America, the very limited progress towards SDG 8 is mainly owed to the high levels of inequality in wealth distribution.
On analysing the data from an income perspective, the significant difference between low-income and high-income countries comes as no surprise. What is surprising, however, is that the progress in a number of high-income countries is interspersed with occasional setbacks. Low-income and lower-middle-income countries, meanwhile, are clearly regressing, which is a cause for concern, given the risks both for workers and the sustainability of the societies in which they live.
As employers struggle increasingly to find workers who fit the jobs on offer, it has become crucial to equip the European workforce with skills for the jobs of the future. Most lists of such skills drawn up by employers include not only technical (or hard) skills but also foundational (or soft) skills. These can be grouped into three categories: cognitive, interpersonal and self-management. Cognitive skills include critical thinking, problem-solving and analysis. Interpersonal skills include the ability to work in teams and to collaborate, along with communication and emotional intelligence. Self-management skills include self-regulation, resilience and adaptability.
Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) connects education and the world of work, unlocking the potential of young people and adults for a brighter future. Yet, it is estimated that 267 million young people are not in employment, education or training. This strategy presents UNESCO's vision to transform TVET for successful and just transition during the period 2022 to 2029, by promoting skills development for empowerment, productive employment and decent work, and facilitate the transition to more digital, green and inclusive economies and societies. UNESCO will support Member States to respond to current and future challenges in TVET, proposing three main priorities: -Develop skills for all individuals to learn, work and live; 2.Develop skills for inclusive andsustainable economies and; 3.Develop skills for inclusive andpeaceful societie UNESCO will work alongside bilateral and multilateral partners, institutions, governments, the private sector, and educators from all over the world to put TVET at the top of the education agenda.
The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) defines refugees as people who have fled war, violence, conflict or persecution and have crossed an international border to find safety in another country. They often have had to flee with little more than the clothes on their back, leaving behind homes, possessions, jobs and loved ones. The UNHCR has estimated that more than 100 million individuals have been forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, violence or human rights violations. This is the highest level of displacement on record and includes 27.1 million refugees in the world - the highest number ever seen. This issue of Focus on... outlines the role vocational education and training (VET) plays in helping refugees and displaced persons integrate into their new communities. It also discusses the barriers and obstacles refugees face and the potential role of technology to improve access to VET and deliver innovative educational solutions.
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Jobs and the economy
“Gaza has witnessed an almost complete destruction of economic activity in all sectors.” That’s the damning analysis of Aya Jaafar, an economist at the UN’s International Labour Organization (ILO).
The ILO estimates that more than 200,000 jobs have been lost in Gaza, some 90 per cent of the pre-conflict workforce. The UN agency further calculates that income losses there have reached $4.1 million per day, which equates to an 80 per cent decrease in the enclave’s GDP (the amount of money earned from the sale of all goods and services). This includes Palestinians who received salaries for work carried out in Israel but who are now unemployed in Gaza.
Construction has typically been one of the most important industries in Gaza, but according to the ILO, activity in the sector is down some 96 per cent. Other key productive areas, including agriculture and the industrial and services sector, have also all but ceased.
The few businesses that are still operating are generally small-scale local enterprises, including bakeries, other food-related businesses and some pharmacies.
What next?
The ILO estimates that perhaps 25 per cent of the people killed in Gaza have been men of working age – generally, women do not work. Ms. Jaafar said the loss of these “breadwinners” will mean that families “will face some economic hardships after the war ends”.
This could mean more children in a future Gazan labour market raising concerns about exploitative child labour.
In the immediate post-war situation, some emergency employment programmes will be “critical to provide incomes to workers who have lost their jobs” as they seek to support their families, Ms. Jaafar said.
It is expected that micro and small enterprises will need emergency grants and wage subsidies as part of the process of restoring activity and to facilitate local economic recovery. Extensive skills development and vocational training will also be required.
A key task for any future government of Gaza is to “identify economic strategies that aim not only at improving the economic conditions, but also ensuring that economic growth creates decent jobs”, she added.
Investment-heavy ILO programmes which provide employment opportunities for local communities while supporting the reconstruction or rehabilitation of the destroyed infrastructure will also play an important role.
This report provides an overview of Zambia’s labor market, highlights key potential sectors for future economic development and employment growth, and analyses the challenges faced by the technical education, vocational, and entrepreneurship training (TEVET) system as it seeks to respond to these developments. A key finding of the report is that Zambia’s demographic transition is at a critical juncture, but the country is not reaping the benefits of its potential demographic opportunities due to high levels of youth disengagement and insufficient jobs growth. Youth constitute more than half of the labor force but have low skill levels and are in low-paying jobs. Skills development, and TEVET in particular, is one of the possible policy levers for economic development and is a strategic focus and priority for the government. The skills development ecosystem in Zambia, and in particular the TEVET system, faces capacity constraints regarding the provision of quality and relevant skills for the labor market. The government policy and programmatic environment is highly fragmented, with concerns over the possible duplication of policies and programming, particularly in relation to out-of-school youth, and technical and vocational skills.
Attacks on education in West and Central Africa have increased in the past 10 years and universities have not been spared, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO.
Issuing the warning at the end of February in several briefing papers, UNESCO stated that most of the attacks occurred in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Niger and Nigeria and were perpetrated by armed conflict groups and government armed forces.
In one of the background papers, ‘Safeguarding education: Policy and data landscapes for the protection of education from attack in West and Central Africa’, UNESCO noted that, since 2017, armed Islamist insurgent groups have been targeting the higher education sector in Burkina Faso. Universities that have been forced to suspend classes from time to time include Dori University and the University of Fada N’Gourma.
In Cameroon, armed separatist groups driven by concerns about the marginalisation of the English-speaking north-west and south-west regions of the country have been engaged in a boycott of education since 2017.
The University of Buea and the University of Bamenda, which are located in those areas, have been under attack several times. According to UNESCO, attacks on education in the far north region of Cameroon have also been carried out by Boko Haram, spreading over the border from Nigeria.
Similarly, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, attacks on education have escalated since 2012, following the outbreak of conflict between the M23 rebel group and the Congolese armed forces, or FARDC, and institutions in the eastern provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri have been the most heavily impacted. “Attacks are carried out by the FARDC, M23, Hutu militia groups, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, and the Allied Democratic Forces,” says UNESCO.
In Mali, schools and universities are also exposed to rebel attacks. Last year, the United Nations reported that about 1,500 out of 9,000 schools in the country were closed or non-functional as a result of insecurity, disrupting the education of half a million learners.
One of the higher education institutions at risk in Mali is the prestigious L’Institut des Hautes Etudes et de Recherches Islamiques Ahmed Baba de Tombouctou (Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research) in Timbuktu, which is still recovering from a 2012 attack. According to UNESCO, the institute has manuscripts of the history of Mali dating from the 14th and 16th centuries.
This paper features the case of NSDC, established as a public private partnership between the Government of India and several industry bodies. 51% of equity in this partnership is held by the private sector (represented through a range of industry associations) and 49% of equity is held by the Government of India. The very structure of this partnership with the private sector as the majority stakeholder, emphasizes the important role given to the private sector within such partnerships. NSDC was explicitly created to catalyse private sector support for skills training. It sought to strengthen India’s skills training ecosystem by expanding the capacity and scale of skills training programmes, enhancing the quality and relevance of training programmes, and improving the employability of youth, through formal sector employment or entrepreneurship.
In this paper, the perspective of international vocational education and training (VET) providers on the issue of transfer from Germany as a origin country to a specific target country is considered. The existing state of research on the topic of VET transfer has so far been largely located at the macro level. Still, to develop a better understanding of transfer, it is useful to include individual projects on a programme basis in the analysis as their understanding in turn shapes the entire transfer work. The study aims to identify the understanding of transfer of vocational training service providers in internationalisation projects, as well as different types of transfer. Case studies are applied that involve German VET providers, sampled from a German funding line. Based on qualitative and quantitative data, process documents and previous research, in-depth interviews with six project actors are conducted to identify the perspectives and approaches for transfer. Among other theoretical approaches, Dolowitz and Marsh's policy transfer framework and Gessler's levels of transfer form the theoretical framework of the study. In the context of the present study, different understandings of transfer can be attributed. Furthermore, using type-building content analysis, four ideal transfer types, namely imitative Re-Combination, adaptative Specialization, adaptative Re-Combination and transformative Specialization are classified. The transfer itself is determined by the project activity rather than by a pre-determined understanding of transfer on the part of the internationally active VET provider. In turn, the project activity shapes the type of transfer in combination with the project partners in the target country context. The project actors focus on structures and content; the transfer of practices and processes is largely understood implicitly and thus less directly forced.
Collecting data and information on labour market needs and skills trends is not sufficient to design and sustain responsive and efficient vocational education and training (VET) programmes and skills formation systems. Economies and societies need robust skill anticipation methods and trusted skills intelligence to translate data into actionable insights that support the skills revolution.
This policy brief reviews trends in skills anticipation in Europe and explains how it contributes to more learning and better matching. It builds on Cedefop's monitoring of national skills anticipation systems and practices in the EU-27, Norway and Iceland and input from Cedefop's ReferNet partners.
The COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted the workplace. Some businesses closed either temporarily or permanently. Others enabled their employees to work from home. Those that could not shift to remote work had to implement new safety procedures to
prevent their employees from getting sick. Along the way, access to skills training was interrupted. In cases where training did continue, its focus often shifted to managing the changes in the workplace caused by the pandemic.
The latest wave of the Survey on Employment and Skills, conducted in March 2023, revisits the issue of access to skills training. Three years after the onset of the pandemic, it finds that more workers are participating in work-related training to improve their skills, while training is becoming less focused on the management of the pandemic. It also shows that the most common type of training is that which focuses on workplace health and safety. The survey finds that working from home does not appear to have posed a barrier to skills training to date, as those who have switched to working from home are more likely than those who continue to work in their regular workplace to access training to improve their skills.
A new CERIC-funded report from Creative Futures Studio Inc. sheds light on 10 megatrends that will shape the future of work in Canada. The report, Career Development in 2040, digs into the trends that workers, employers – as well as those who advise them – need to understand to thrive in a labour market facing massive disruption. Based on an extensive literature review of as well as interviews with career development professionals (CDPs) and career services users, the report highlights 10 major trends:
Work Anywhere
AI & Automation
Living with Climate Change
Geopolitical Conflicts
Reconciling the Impacts of Colonialism
Economic Precarity
Globalization Under Pressure
Education, Disrupted
Declining Mental Health & Well-being
Generational Shifts
The report also identifies microtrends within each area (32 in total), including the impact of the “green skills revolution” on new jobs creation, greater recognition of the skills of neurodivergent individuals, the increasing popularity of the “learn and earn” model of post-secondary education and how Gen Z’s values-driven approach to work will inform their leadership.
In an environment of accelerating technological change and increasing digitalization, firms need to adopt new technologies faster than ever before to stay competitive. This paper examines whether updates of education curricula help to bring new technologies faster into firms' workplaces. We study technology changes and curriculum updates from an early wave of digitalization (i.e., computernumerically controlled machinery, computer-aided design, and desktop publishing software). We take a text-as-data approach and tap into two novel data sources to measure change in educational content and the use of technology at the workplace: first, vocational education curricula and, second, firms' job advertisements. To examine the causal effects of adding new technology skills to curricula on the diffusion of these technologies in firms' workplaces (measured by job advertisements), we use an event study design. Our results show that curriculum updates substantially shorten the time it takes for new technologies to arrive in firms' workplaces, especially for mainstream firms.
The paper describes Canada's most effective interventions being developed to increase the successful participation of women in apprenticeship and other skilled technical fields.
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