Lessons from Country Diagnosis: An Insufficient Alignment between Training Supply and Economic Demand

The goal of any vocational training course is to see its trainees find work, ideally in the area corresponding to their skills, but at least in some economic activity. But the diagnoses in the three countries show that the labor markets’ and employment niches’ needs in terms of qualifications, that form the basis of any professional integration policy, are poorly understood, which explains the oft-noted divide between trainees’ qualifications and the true needs of the respective economies.

This situation can be explained in part by the lack of structuring documents (manuals, guidelines, legal and regulatory texts), and on the other hand by the insufficient involvement/motivation of private actors in the process of steering training, resulting in the difficulties faced by training management to account for economic demand, because they have little or no dialogue with economic players.

Furthermore, the lack of harmonization of procedures and tools for the identification of labor market needs and their evolution, as well as to monitor the integration of trainees, mean that existing mechanisms are ineffective.

This raises the issue of the communication and information deficit between training stakeholders and businesses. Moreover, the absence of generalized use of competency-based approaches or other types of business-based training is not devoid of consequences in terms of the difficulties vocational training face in responding to the labor market’s qualification needs.

In this context, vocational education systems continue to be managed according to a school-like approach, meaning that public vocational training players determine whether to open a training center in similar fashion to education players deciding to open a school.

Finally, the lack of human and financial needs has emerged as a major constraint to the development of demand-driven management approaches to vocational training supply.