Читать книгу Economics and Governance of Vocational and Professional Education and Training (including Apprenticeship) (E-Book) - Uschi Backes-Gellner - Страница 24

The article summarizes challenges and opportunities faced by leaders who want to initiate effective reforms in VET and by scientists who want to analyze VET. In general, most people agree that VET should prepare for future employment. If outcome effects are not as good as expected, reform leaders need to act. However, leaders must be aware that VET programs are socially constructed and depend on the political economy and other value-driven institutions. Additionally, trying to opt for a certain type of VET approach (such as that of Germany or Switzerland) means identifying functional equivalences between programs of interest. Furthermore, in most cases, an entire architecture of functional and conceptual equivalents must be identified to develop a strategy of how to reform the involved institutions. Functions are goal settings to overcome fundamental problems (Turner, 1997). If functions are fulfilled through socially constructed equivalent concepts, this can be seen as a robust social institution. Identifying and measuring the interplay of involved social institutions and their robustness may help certain reform processes succeed (Renold et al., 2019).

The starting point of VET reforms is often bad outcome results on the labor market. However, it is not enough to criticize the actors of the education system because their graduates do not meet the requirements of the labor market. Policy-makers and reform leaders need to self-critically ask why the companies of an industry are not substantially involved in the training of future professionals and what kind of political economy underlines their behavior. Such sociocultural and socioeconomic analysis may explain challenges in the education and training approach and can act as an eye-opener for further policy measures.

Furthermore, every reform team needs to understand how to locate its current VET programs in its own education system. The classifications in this article can be an initial support. The next step is to decide which type of program a reform team wants to pursue. It is then indispensable to establish a relationship between the relevant actors and institutions and to involve them accordingly over a long time to develop robust social institutions (Renold et al., 2019). If a country succeeds in institutionalizing the dialog among all the actors involved and better aligning education and employment systems throughout the entire education process, an important step will have been taken towards an effective VET system.