Characteristics of the World’s Top VET Systems:

1. Provides students with a broad education designed to prepare them to easily gain additional skills and knowledge needed as their career goals, technology and work organization change over their employed lifetime
2. Provides opportunities for students to learn and to practice necessary cognitive and non-cognitive skills in an authentic industry setting
3. Provides opportunities for students to learn the theory behind the practice
4. Creates learning environments in which students can learn and practice on state of the art equipment
5. Provides opportunities for students to move from vocational track to academic, university track and vice versa
6. Provides opportunities for students to move up from the lowest levels of occupational preparation to the highest levels of academic and professional preparation with career guidance along the way
7. Provides standards and qualifications widely recognized in the labor market and continually adjusted to the leading edge of industries, including the increasingly global nature of occupations
8. Is adapted to the level of economic development of the economy in which the student will work and to the level of technological advancement and work organization characteristic of that economy
9. Provides a distribution of training slots that is reasonably related to the demands of the economy, in terms of occupations and levels of qualifications needed to operate the economy
10. Provides instructors who have industry experience and whose knowledge of the industry is fully current with state of the art practice
11. Provides incentives adequate to attract the necessary number and quality of instructors for each occupational group and qualification level
12. Provides incentives adequate to attract qualified students to each level of the skills training system
13. Builds on a basic education system that provides students entering the vocational education system with the skills and knowledge needed to engage productively with the vocational education system
14. Creates a brand that makes vocational education an attractive opportunity to young people who have options

Must Reading

CIEB’s four-part international comparative study of vocational and technical education systems aimed at informing the efforts underway in many countries to redesign vocational education and training systems for the 21^st century.

Titles in this series include:

Gold Standard: The Swiss Vocational Education and Training System

The Phoenix: Vocational Education and Training in Singapore

Made in China: Challenge and Innovation in China’s Vocational Education and Training System,

And a forthcoming report on vocational and technical education in the United States.