The long term educational needs of a high-technology society

This paper provides a synthesis of information from extant research and policy documentation on information technology (IT) workforce issues in the US and abroad. In particular, it addresses some of the issues that concerned the USA's 21st Century Workforce Commission, which was established to look at the IT labour market. It defines the IT market fairly broadly and is concerned with the overall IT workforce. The paper covers both supply and demand issues and looks to address a variety of questions concerning the longer-term nature of IT employment and any potential labour market imperfections that may arise through inappropriate educational strategies. It looks at the skills needed to obtain IT jobs, ways to increase the supply of IT workers, and describes and assesses a number of foreign programmes for training individuals for IT employment.     

From labour to learn 1 : the limits of labour society and the possibilities of learning society

This article presents sociologically and historically oriented reconceptualizations of the changing relationship between labour and learning in the reflexive modern era. First it claims that the whole modern division of labour does not merely reveal the nature by which we define morality but also it is a crucial condition for the whole solidarity of human kind. It creates between people the holistic system of rights and duties, which bonds them together permanently. Then the article comes to the conclusion that the first modern period, and the Keynesian welfare state policy with its homogenous workforce and policies of full employment, has come to its historical end. Consequently, the steady progress of the population along educational pathways into secure full‐time working lives can no longer be taken for granted. The process of the redivision of labour is liable to generate many problems for society and individual citizens since so many of our societal institutions and expectations have been constructed on parameters defined by the labour market, wage earning and promotions. The article then puts forward the scenario of the risk society where confidence coexists with fear, security with threat, credibility with ambivalence, and conflict over the distribution of goods turn out to be conflicts over distribution of bads. The author sees that education has always been seen as a major component in the great Enlightenment project, which has been connected and incorporated by the national state. Lifelong learning on the contrary has been less incorporated, less an early modern, but more a marginal and informal position, waving the flag for both individuals and groups from below. The article claims that the new era of reflexive modernization may see the rise of lifelong learning and perhaps also the partial collapse of the old pre‐modern educational system.

It may be that some of what we regard as European trends in adult education research are at the moment more programmes or wishes than facts, but an understanding of such trends can be helpful for future developments in our research. (Jarvis and Poggeler 1994: 10)     

Assessing instructional conceptions: A task-based approach

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the labour market effects of two rather different forms of vocational education, full‐time education with practice periods that have no employment status versus dualized education with an emphasis on continuous on‐the‐job/in‐service training and employee status for the apprentice. Although most developed countries know both forms of vocational education, these usually have clearly different positions in a qualitative (standardization of curricula and degrees) and a quantitative (cohort shares) sense. The Netherlands present an interesting case, because in this country both systems coexist and contribute largely to the vocational training of each new generation. That provides a good opportunity for investigating differences in the labour market effects of these ‘treatments’ in vocational education. In this article, differences in labour market careers (i.e. the chances of getting promoted or getting unemployed) between graduates from full‐time vocational education and from the dual system are explored, using event history analysis. The results show that graduates from full‐time tracks have higher chances of getting promoted. However, the period of transition to the labour market is very unstable, involving job shifts and periods of unemployment. Graduates from the dual system on the other hand experience a more stable period of labour market entry. At the same time their careers often involve many dead‐end jobs, from which no promotion takes place. Moreover, they have difficulty in transfering their skills to other sectors than the sector for which they are trained.     

Learning to adapt: does returning to education improve labour market outcomes?

The transition into a post-industrial economy changed the nature of the Australian labour market extinguishing jobs in traditional industries and creating jobs in new industries. Workers displaced from the manufacturing sector and women seeking to re-enter the labour market after taking time out for family reasons need to retrain in order to secure full-time employment in new industries. Consequently, returning to education is a relatively common occurrence in Australia as adults adapt to the changing demands of the labour market. Using the first 12 waves of the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia data, this paper examines the characteristics of those who return to education and gain new educational qualifications. The effect of upgrading educational qualifications on employment outcomes is also examined. The results show that those with higher levels of education were more likely than those with low levels of education to complete new qualifications after the age of 25 and that employment outcomes vary according to level of qualification completed.     

从社会网络关系强度透视两类群体职业获得

当前,农民工和大学生这两个群体在求职过程中都面临着困境,其求职大都依赖强关系。研究表明,弱关系在个人求职过程中可以充当跨越其社会界限去获得信息和其他资源的角色,理应在求职中发挥重要作用。提高弱关系在农民工和大学生求职中发挥作用的比例,关键是完善劳动力市场,加速信息流动,强化技能培训,将市场化运作和个人素质提高相结合。     

Is It worth Being ‘Traditional’ in An Era of Mass Individualization?

This article deals with the question of how the segmentation of higher education participation connects with the segmentation of the graduate labour market into jobs with different levels of quality. With data comprising educational and labour market histories of graduates with Master's degree from nine European countries, the author analyses how graduates with traditional higher education careers come off on the European labour market compared to those with non‐traditional educational careers. When examining the quality of the employment that graduates obtain early on in their career, three criteria are applicable: the job stability and the quality of the education‐job match to both the level of their studies and skills. The method used in the analysis is logistic regression. Results indicate that being a traditional/non‐traditional graduate does affect the odds of finding proper employment; however, whether the influence is positive or negative greatly varies with respect to gender; the number of graduates with the same type of educational career on the local market and the criteria used to evaluate the adequacy of the employment.     

Lifelong learning and the continued participation of older Norwegian adults in employment

The number of people aged 60 and over across the globe is expected to double by 2050, reaching a share of more than 20 percent of the population total. Governments are therefore taking more and more policy actions to encourage ageing workers to extend their working lives and their employers to retain them. According to the OECD lifelong learning opportunities and inclusive labour markets will be essential to ensuring that workers of all educational backgrounds have the possibility of extending their working lives. This article examines the relationship between adult education completed after age 40 and the subsequent active participation of older adults in employment, using individual register data from Statistics Norway. The results show a substantial effect of upgrading formal education on subsequent labour market participation. Overall effects are quite similar for males and females. Attaining a lower level tertiary degree has the largest impact on labour market participation both for males and females. Completing a secondary education has a strong, long term impact among males. The results suggest that facilitating access to formal education among older workers may be an important contribution to extending working lives.     

Graduating in uncertain times: The impact of COVID-19 on recent graduate career prospects,trajectories and outcomes

This article examines the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on recent UK graduates' initial employment outcomes and how they experience the transition into a challenging labour market context. We draw on longitudinal survey and interview data, collected from recent graduates who had mainly graduated during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in summer 2020 that examines graduate perception of the labour market, impacts on labour market entry impacts and early career progression and effects of periods of unemployment or under-employment. The article shows some of the main impacts of the recent pandemic-affected labour market, including: widespread concerns about job opportunities and employer support, the perceived employment impacts of the pandemic and early signs of scarring and labour market disorientation amongst those who were struggling to find employment of their choice. Such experiences are clearly intensified during the specific COVID-19 context, but the policy implications they raise have wider relevance for supporting graduates during future periods of labour market volatility.     

‘The degree is not enough’: students’ perceptions of the role of higher education credentials for graduate work and employability

The UK Government is calling upon higher education students to see their learning as an investment that will give them direct benefits in the labour market. At the same time, the relationship between educational credentials and their returns in labour market has been changing in recent times. Based on a qualitative study with 53 final‐year undergraduate students in a pre‐1992 university, this article examines the way higher education students understand the role of their educational credentials in relation to their future employability. It shows that students perceive their academic qualifications as having a declining role in shaping their employment outcomes in what is perceived to be a congested and competitive graduate labour market. While academic credentials are still seen as a significant dimension of their employability, students increasingly see the need to add value to them in order to gain an advantage in the labour market.     

Adult learning and qualifications in Britain

The importance of people gaining new, and high-level, qualifications in adulthood has been much emphasised in policy rhetoric. It is widely assumed that adults should engage in learning throughout their working life in order to adapt to changing conditions in the labour market and to ensure that national economies remain competitive in a global skills race. Educational researchers have frequently been rather sceptical about the numbers who actually achieve such upgrading in practice and have been critical of the feasibility and relevance of policies which attempt to address this issue. This paper provides empirical evidence on how many people acquire qualifications in adulthood, and whether they upgrade to higher levels of qualification than previously held, using British data from the 1958 National Child Development Study. Estimates are constructed of the volume of qualification acquisition and upgrading for this cohort through to age 50. On the basis of this new evidence, it is argued that previous analyses by educational researchers may have been overly pessimistic about the extent to which individuals engage in accredited learning over the adult lifecourse. The implications for research and policy are discussed.     

Returns on vocational education over the life cycle: Between immediate labour market preparation and lifelong employability

An important issue in the design of secondary-level education is the balance between conveying general and occupation-specific (vocational) skills. On the one hand, vocationally oriented programmes, providing occupation-specific skills with immediate labour market relevance, have repeatedly been shown to secure safe pathways into employment. On the other hand, these programmes tend to put less emphasis on developing general knowledge, skills and competencies, including numeracy and literacy, which are foundational to lifelong learning. Hence, when the needs of the labour market change, employees who opted for a vocational track when they were at secondary school risk being less flexible in adapting to such changes later in their career. The authors of this article examine whether this results in a trade-off between short-term gains and long-term losses by considering differences in the labour market careers of vocationally and generally educated respondents in the 2012 Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). Their results suggest that early labour market benefits of vocational specialisation decrease over time; the authors relate this to its lower ability to equip secondary school students – future employees – with skills for lifelong learning.     

Hard Lessons for Lifelong Learners? Age and Experience in the Graduate Labour Market

The expansion of the higher education system and widening access to undergraduate study has led to growing diversity within the graduate labour supply, including increasing numbers who studied for their degrees as mature students. Analysis of graduates entering the labour market prior to the major expansion in the early 1990s indicated that those over the age of 30 had considerably more difficulty than younger graduates in accessing the career opportunities for which their education had equipped them. Is this still the case for more recent graduates? Drawing on a major qualitative and quantitative study of a class of graduates who completed their undergraduate degree courses in 1995, this paper explores early career development and employment outcomes according to age at graduation. Although we find considerable diversity among all age groups, mature graduates were more likely than their younger peers to experience difficulty in accessing appropriate employment, had a lower rate of earnings growth and expressed higher levels of dissatisfaction with their jobs.     

Exploring doctorate holders’ perceptions of the non-academic labour market and reputational problems they relate to their employment

Doctoral employment outside universities has been increasing, as universities cannot employ all doctorate holders. Nevertheless, it has been argued that the shift from doctoral programs to the non-academic labour market has been limited. In this qualitative study, more than 800 verbal answers given by doctorate holders to a pair of open-ended questions were content-analysed to explore doctorate holders’ perceptions of the non-academic labour market and the reputational problems they relate to their employment. The study identifies four reputational problems which doctorate holders relate to their employment: the oversupply problem, the overeducation problem, the consistency problem and the communication problem. By identifying potential reputational problems on the doctorate holders level, this research contributes novel information in terms of both theory development and practitioner insights.

     

Busting the myth of low-skilled workers – destabilizing EU LLL policies through the life stories of Danes in low-skilled jobs

In the EU, ambitious objectives have been set for education and training since the adoption of the Lisbon Agenda in 2000. The policies aim among other things to empower the individual through participation in lifelong learning which is seen as both a right and a duty: ‘People need to want and to be able to take their lives into their own hands – to become in short, active citizens’ (CEC, 2000, p. 7). However, not all citizens are taking part in lifelong learning and consequently the EU and its member states have set up policies with a ‘particular focus on active and preventative measures for the unemployed and inactive persons’ (CEC, 2006, p.1). ‘Inactive’ persons comprise different groups which are marginalised in terms of participation in lifelong learning, among others ‘low-skilled’ who have a lower participation rate in education and training activities (Cedefop, 2013). In this article, the aim is to destabilize the political discourse on ‘low-skilled’ through individual narratives of being in low-skilled jobs. Whereas the problem of being low-skilled from a political perspective is represented as psycho-social problems of the individual, the narratives point to the complexity of people in low-skilled jobs and the role of structure to ‘low-skilledness’. The narratives open up issues of power and the historical arbitrary distinctions between skilled and unskilled in the Danish labour market. It opens up for how the educational structures produce ‘low-skilled’ people, especially in the transition from basic vocational education and training into an apprenticeship. The article points to the narrow focus of policies on the ‘supply’ side of lifelong learning and less on the ‘demand’ side of a ‘needy’ global labour market in which precarious jobs are no longer limited to low-skilled. The article draws on Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ (1999, 2009) and narrative inquiry.     

Women Returners to Further Education: employment and gender relations in the home

The education and retraining of ‘women returners’ to the labour market was an innovative development in further education in Britain in the 1980s. Fifty‐six women who undertook a part‐time information technology course at a college of further education in Birmingham were the subjects of this study. They were the respondents to a questionnaire sent to all women who had studied on the courses run between early 1987 and late 1989. A small number were subsequently interviewed. The aims of the research were twofold: firstly, to study their current employment situations and secondly to investigate the impact of employment on gender relations in the home. Almost all the women had been able to re‐enter employment, most using the skills they had learned on the course. However the course had not been instrumental in breaking down gender segregation in computing and few women worked in professional or male dominated jobs. The majority were in clerical, secretarial or administrative work, though this did mean that most had been able to rejoin the labour force at the same occupational level at which they had left. Some women, including half the black women in the study, improved their occupational position. It is argued that training for women who are in employment needs to be more available, otherwise the women in the study will not be able to progress into better jobs as their confidence grows and family commitments lessen. The study confirmed the continued pervasiveness of ideologies which prioritise men's employment and position of ‘breadwinners’ and women's continued responsibility for home and children. The conclusion of the study is that although feminists and others keen to promote equality for women in employment have made child care and more flexible working conditions the central issues, marriage and the sexual division of labour in the home, whilst equally significant, have been neglected and need to be given more consideration, both theoretically and strategically.     

Skills for school leavers in Sri Lanka: TEUsLes vocations pour les sortants d'école au Sri Lanka: Groupes d'enseignement technique — Technical Education UnitsOficios para alumnos terminando su edad escolar en Sri Lanka: UET

Technical Education Units (TEUs) are short-cycle skill development programmes for a wide range of rural and urban occupations. They are intended for unemployed youth. Initiated in 1974, the TEUs now number over 900 and 35,000 students were reported enrolled in 1981.Although attached to regular secondary schools, the TEUs have tried to base their training on the needs and opportunities of their particular localities. To this end, they seek local participation in the chouce and design of their courses. In particular, they try to provide links to the local labour market, together with support facilities for self-employment.Despite problems and short-falls in expectations, the TEU programme seems a fundamentally sound approach to skill development. Particularly stressed is that, where local initiative has been supported by regional authority, there has been little problem in attracting school-leavers to courses or in placing them in employment. The role of influential local individuals is not to be underestimated.     

勾勒关键能力,打造优质生活——OECD关键能力框架概述

关键能力是个人实现自我、终身发展、融入主流社会和充分就业所必需的知识、技能及态度之集合,是一种通用能力或横向能力,从而使得每个人具有追求完美人生的热忱,以积极公民的身份参与社会进步的本领和在劳动力市场获得充分就业的表现。关键能力框架的核心是"个体的自我认识能力",表明其心智成熟、道德完善,勇于为自我学习和行动负责。     

Economic Liberalisation,Qualifications and Livelihoods in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka experienced a rapid expansion of population in the first few decades following Independence in 1948. Population growth far outstripped the rate of growth of the economy which remained mostly dependent on primary production for export and domestic consumption. Introduction of universal free education pre-dated political independence and led to rapid school enrolments. In a slow-growth economy, dominated by state enterprises, education became the main avenue of upward social mobility for many underprivileged young people. Increasing competition for education and white-collar employment in the then dominant state sector in the 1960s and the 1970s necessitated policy interventions that were not necessarily fair to all competing social and ethnic groups. In the late 1970s, the policy focus shifted from education to liberal economic reforms aimed at generating economic growth and employment creation. Early gains in terms of economic expansion were slowed down by the ethnic conflict that erupted in 1983 and continues to retard economic development in the country. While the affluent strata continue to gain from the open economic and liberal educational environment in terms of income and lucrative employment opportunities, many young people from lower social strata who possess conventional paper qualifications live in despair looking for scarce white-collar jobs. Those who have resources to invest in overseas training and/or foreign qualifications are in an advantaged position in the competition for private and transnational sector employment.     

对高校毕业生就业市场特点的认识

如何建立毕业生就业市场、建立怎样的就业市场，是当前业体制改革的重点和难点。社会主义市场经济体制改革的客观现实，教育事业发展的现状，高校招生、就业制度的改革等均呼唤毕业生就业市场的建立与完善，并且从就业制度改革的程度、毕业生谋职择业的成本、毕业生就业市场的管理及高校本身的职能等因素来看，均强调毕业生就业市场应以高校为主体。     

高校聘任制改革下的教师法律地位审视

在市场经济体制下,随着我国高等学校人事制度改革的不断深入,高等院校逐步推行教师聘任制。鉴于我国现行法律、法规对高等学校的法律地位和性质。高校与教师之间的法律关系没有清晰的界定,理论界对教师聘任合同的性质存在不同认识,难以有效解决高校与教师之间的纠纷,不利于高校的健康发展。文章对高校教师的法律地位进行思考,以此明确教师与高校之间的法律关系,规范教师聘任行为,顺利推进高校人事制度改革。