Search Results for
"Vocational education"

The horizontal segregation of the workforce along gender lines tends to assign women to lower paid, lower status employment. Consequently, schemes to address segregation have focused on preparing women to enter non-traditional occupations through training and development processes. This article examines models to encourage women into non-traditional employment, focusing on the Women into Non-Traditional Sectors (WINS) project in Belfast, Northern Ireland. However, changing women to suit a hostile work environment assumes women to be the problem, whereas it is the barriers that women face in undertaking non-traditional jobs that need to be changed. It is concluded, therefore, that while models such as WINS can be successful in assisting women into non-traditional sectors, change processes to make workplaces more accessible are a more pressing and appropriate approach to de-segregating the workforce. © 2009 The vocational Aspect of education Ltd.

Falling growth rates, in general, and the current economic crisis, in particular, have placed renewed importance on the question of whether publicly sponsored training programmes, in broad terms, and vocational or firm-specific training, more specifically, protect employees from unemployment or help the un-employed find work. This paper analyses the function of general education and vocational training at the beginning of the employment career and the effectiveness of publicly sponsored further training that is provided for the (un-) employed. In relation to this major and more general problem, the economic crisis is of less importance in explaining outcomes. Taking into account the central role of education and qualifications for labourmarket success in Germany, the paper shows that the crisis has not been used in an optimal way to help the less qualified achieve higher attainment levels. © 2009 Duncker und Humblot GmbH. All rights reserved.

This paper reports on a funded research project into the experiences of tourism, hospitality and cruise management students on internship outside the UK as part of their British university degree between 2007 and 2009. The research reflected on the perceptions of students, course managers, placement officers and members of university placement groups. The research makes use of data collected in focus groups, by interviews and from a survey, to examine the issues relating to student support, non-UK placements, the options for maintaining contact and institutional concerns. The project has generated useful findings and results to inform university work-placement managers about developing mechanisms for supporting students and it has highlighted important issues relating to policy making and the inherent problems associated with managing overseas placements. © 2009 The vocational Aspect of education Ltd.

Competence-based vocational education is based on a constructivist learning paradigm, where the development of students' personal professional knowledge is emphasised. However, there is a lack of insight into how students construct their own professional knowledge and what the content and nature of personal professional knowledge is. This article elaborates the concept Personal Professional Theory (PPT): a personal knowledge base in which professional knowledge and beliefs are internalised. PPTs are built upon a combination of declarative and procedural knowledge and are stored in the long-term memory. Furthermore, knowledge in PPTs refers to compiled knowledge which can be specified and applied to different professional situations. These PPTs develop through an interrelated process of internalisation and socialisation, in which students grow into the existing body of shared knowledge and collective norms, values and beliefs of professionals of an occupational domain. It is concluded that the elaboration of PPTs can be used to stimulate and monitor personal professional knowledge development in vocational education, but further research into the content and nature of PPTs is required. © 2009 The vocational Aspect of education Ltd.

The first part of the paper outlines and discusses the nature of work-based learning (WBL) and WBL programmes, and the overall direction of government strategy towards WBL programmes in Higher education (HE) in England, with particular reference to postgraduate programmes, policy documents, and the WBL literature. Drawing upon case study research, the paper then presents an overview of the postgraduate WBL programmes offered by three English universities. There follows a presentation and analysis of the views of teaching staff and managers with respect to the operation of these programmes. A number of benefits were identified, including flexibility, student career development, and student’s enhanced influence over the learning process and content. A number of problems were also identified, including a lack of awareness of, interest in, and resistance to the programmes on the behalf of the wider university academic community. © 2009 The vocational Aspect of education Ltd.

A survey of managers in charge of employer engagement activities in UK business schools and departments was completed to ascertain: (1) the employer engagement methods that were most commonly used by institutions; (2) business school managers' attitudes towards employers' involvement in course design; and (3) the respondents' perceptions of the benefits and problems connected with employer engagement programmes. Possible antecedents of the extent of a business school or department's engagement with employers were examined together with the link between the extent of engagement and the actual level of employment of a university's business graduates. Hypothesised determinants of the extent of employer engagement included top management's predilections towards employability matters, a business school's ‘organisational distance’ from the corporate world, financial circumstances, and the size and age of the institution. A model to explain the extent of a business school or department's employer engagement was constructed and tested. It emerged that managerial predilections and a university's financial situation exerted especially powerful effects on the extent of engagement. © 2009 The vocational Aspect of education Ltd.

Research evidence shows that a career dialogue is a central part of any powerful learning environment for career learning. In vocational education and training, there are three important parties in this dialogue: the student, the teacher and the mentor from practice. In this paper the communication between these parties is investigated in secondary vocational training in the Netherlands. Results suggest that the potential of the dialogue (or trialogue, as it concerns three parties) is hardly utilised: the communication between student, teacher and mentor from practice is not dialogical and only discusses the most successful way to a degree, but not to a career. © 2009 The vocational Aspect of education Ltd.

Since 2001 there has been a renewed government focus on skills development and its relationship with combating unemployment in Ghana. Technical and vocational education and training (hereinafter; TVET), delivered through public and private schools, vocational training institutes and informal apprenticeship training, continues to be seen as an important link to work. Rising concern over the large number of junior high school graduates that are unable to access further formal education and training has led politicians and policy makers to demand a National Apprenticeship Programme and ambitious plans are being put in place to move towards a more regulated, or formalised, informal apprenticeship system. This article examines these plans and argues that the government needs both to consider fully the ramifications of their proposed activities under the National Apprenticeship Programme, as well as learn from previous programmes in Ghana (and elsewhere) that have attempted to upgrade informal apprenticeships. © 2009 The vocational Aspect of education Ltd.

Dutch prevocational secondary schools are reforming their educational programmes to make them more competence-based. This reform has substantial implications for the roles played by teachers. Yet, little empirical research has been conducted on teachers’ processes of competence development in vocational settings. This study explores teachers’ individual action theories regarding the introduction of competence-based prevocational secondary education. The cognitive apprenticeship model provides a conceptual framework for addressing this issue. The research questions addressed here are: How do teachers value elements of the cognitive apprenticeship model in designing and delivering competence-based prevocational secondary education?, and, What individual action theories do teachers have regarding competence-based prevocational secondary education? The study was designed in two phases. In the qualitative phase, interviews and concept map techniques were used, while the quantitative phase employed a questionnaire. Teachers valued elements of the cognitive apprenticeship model differently, and suggested two additional features: a custom-made educational approach and the professionalisation of teachers. © 2009 The vocational Aspect of education Ltd.