Australians are more educated than ever, yet there are increasingly complex connections between qualifications and work — a mismatch. This is felt most among Vocational Education and Training (VET) graduates, with just a third holding jobs directly associated to their qualification in 2013.
New research by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) has found that reforming training qualifications could provide workers with stronger capabilities, helping them to better adapt to a changing labour market and reducing the growing skills mismatch.
Linking qualifications and the labour market through capabilities and vocational streams questions whether the answer to Australia’s skills paradox is in providing more generalist degrees or placing greater emphasis on generic or employability skills in the VET sector. It explores the idea of another level of skills that currently receives no policy support: between the ‘generalist’ qualifications delivered by secondary schools and higher education and the highly job-specific competencies in the VET sector.
It comes to a number of conclusions:
- The VET in Schools program does not enable successful transitions to the labour market or post-compulsory education. This occurs because low-level certificates included in the program (generally certificates I and II) are not generally recognised as a pathway to employment or higher-level studies.
- Narrowly focused qualifications can lead to a skills mismatch as graduates move into the workforce. The report suggests developing qualifications that prepare students for ‘vocational streams’, based on occupations with shared practices, knowledge, skills and attributes. This would provide graduates with more transferrable skills, helping them adapt to a changing labour market.
- For vocational streams to be successful, there needs to be similarities in the practices, knowledge, skills and attributes shared by related occupations, and institutions, employers, unions, government and professional bodies need to collaborate to develop pathways between these related occupations.
To read the full report, visit the NCVER website.
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