Читать книгу The Swiss Vocational Education and Trainig Initiative India - Ursula Renold - Страница 14

Switzerland’s population is highly educated with a literacy rate of over 99 per cent. Moreover, most residents have a post-compulsory school-leaving certificate as their level of highest education, of which 47.8 per cent have an upper-secondary II education certificate and 40.2 per cent a tertiary level degree (2014; data BFS 2015). Accordingly, only 12 per cent of the population hold just a compulsory school-leaving status.

As for the labour market, Switzerland had a participation rate of almost 70 per cent, with the unemployment rate at a level of 4.7 per cent in 2014 (data FSO 2015). The youth unemployment rate of 8.6 per cent (FSO 2015) points to the good labour market situation for young people. The KOF Youth Labour Market Index in Figure 1 shows that Switzerland and Germany enjoy high values in comparison to India and the OECD countries (for more information, see Renold, et al. 2014, Renold / Bolli 2014). It is therefore not surprising that Switzerland – according to World Bank[3] statistics – had a GDP of approximately 55,000 US dollars per capita in 2013 (purchasing power parity constant 2011) and an average monthly wage of about 6,100 US dollars (FSO 2015) in 2012. In addition, Switzerland is very active in the creation of innovations, as its first place in the INSEAD Global Innovation Index 2014[4] testifies.

These figures lead one to ask where the differences lie between Switzerland and India, and how can similarly good economic conditions be replicated? A common view, based on Becker’s human capital theory (Becker 1964), is that cross-linking of the education system and the labour market in a country is of key importance. Becker’s theory asserts that a good education system provides the knowledge and skills needed in the labour market. In applying this theory to Switzerland, we can see that the Swiss education system and labour market are in fact very closely connected to each other. The part of the education system that provides the knowledge and skills for the labour market is vocational and professional education and training (VPET), based on the upper-secondary II and tertiary level. VPET trains highly-qualified employees for various types of occupations, thus covering the labour market demands and boosting the Swiss economy (SBFI 2014). On average, two-thirds of a youth cohort choose a vocational education and training programme option leading to a Swiss federal VET diploma. The remaining third will acquire an academic baccalaureate or another general education qualification. To help provide an understanding of why VET is such an attractive option, we describe below the Swiss education system, which comprises academic education as well as vocational education and training.

Figure 1: The youth labour market situation in Switzerland (yellow), Germany (blue), India (red) and OECD countries (light blue). The higher the indicator’s value, the better the situation is. A value of 0 means that no data is available. Compiled by the authors