Search Results for
"Vocational education"

A questionnaire was distributed to the heads of graduate recruitment in 900 British firms querying the recipients’ views on (1) the main benefits alleged to accrue to students on vocational degrees who complete work experience periods; (2) the value for graduate employability of paid work undertaken during term time and vacations; and (3) the contributions to employability of academic group work within vocational degrees. A conjoint analysis examined the participants’ evaluations of the relative importance of a job applicant having graduated from a programme that included a work placement, compared with the candidate possessing a ‘good’ class of degree, a qualification from a pre-1992 university rather than a post-1992 institution, and a degree with substantial group-work content. It emerged that (despite the many changes in the British higher education environment occurring over the last couple of decades [top-up fees, widening participation, students engaging extensively in term-time employment, etc.]) most of the respondents held generally positive opinions regarding the usefulness of work placements. Sample members also tended to favour job applicants whose degrees had contained elements of group work. The class of degree a person had obtained and the type of university attended were seen as substantially less important for employability than whether the individual had completed a work placement. © 2008 The vocational Aspect of education Ltd.

This paper outlines research undertaken at a Northern UK university in partnership with a local further education college. The research was underpinned by reference to national policies, government strategies and the findings of others in the field, and involved the collection and analysis of interview and questionnaire data from apprentices and employers; an examination of the local and regional skills profile; liaison with the sector skills council; and the development of a new form of qualification. The outcome of the research was the development of a pilot Higher Level Apprenticeship scheme as a progression route for Level 3 Motor Vehicle apprentices, which combined both academic and professional qualifications and which met the identified Level 4 needs of this group of learners. This research has highlighted not only the need for a new form of work-based progression but has also recognised the direction which such a programme should take as an employer-led and customer-driven course, thus providing wider relevance across the higher education sector than simply its application to its local setting. © 2008 The vocational Aspect of education Ltd.

In Germany, the group of young people with the most extended transition from school to work are those achieving higher education entrance qualifications (Abitur), then serving an apprenticeship in the German dual system and later pursuing higher education. On the basis of three Anglo-German comparative studies, this article highlights the factors influencing the young people’s choice to enter the dual system, such as strong social support by relevant persons (e.g. family members) and a distinct self-esteem and self-concept. It is pointed out that those entering the dual system are more risk-averse than other students with higher education entrance qualifications. It can be shown that many of those who start to study after the apprenticeship choose subjects based on the occupational field they have been trained in. © 2008 The vocational Aspect of education Ltd.

The dual system of vocational training, utilising both company training and vocational school attendance, is generally acknowledged to be a successful model for reducing youth unemployment. However, the decreasing number of training opportunities in countries with this system poses a crisis for the approach. One strategy for overcoming the problem involves offering incentives for companies to create new take-ups. The present study explores the necessary conditions for successfully influencing the number of training places through apprenticeship marketing. It does so following the realistic evaluation approach. A comparison of qualitative case studies of six projects demonstrates that context, in the sense of basic structural conditions and political sensibility, plays a role in the success of a project. However, even more important is the form of the project itself. This regards the behaviour of the actors involved (politics) as well as the choice of the measures (policy) and project organisation (polity). The study stresses the combined effects of these factors. © 2008 The vocational Aspect of education Ltd.

WORKPLACE LEARNING IS AN ESSENTIAL PART of every vocational education and training programme in the Netherlands. As in other countries, the workplace is regarded as an environment with great learning potential (Bailey, Hughes and Moore, 2004; Billet, 1999), and learning in such an environment is considered indispensable for the development of job-relevant competencies. As a consequence, a substantial amount of training time is spent on workplace learning and its importance is stressed by an act passed by the Dutch government, which states that a diploma is to be awarded to a student only when he has satisfactorily completed the period of workplace learning. Nevertheless, important as it is, workplace learning is also problematic. Studies point to insufficient preparation, interaction and organisation (Blokhuis, Jellema and Nijhof, 2002). Improving the quality of workplace learning is considered necessary by all the parties involved. The interesting question is how. © 2008 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

The advent of the global information society and a myriad of other rapidly changing variables are presenting many new and unique challenges for the twenty-first century workforce, and perhaps the most pressing of these challenges is actually meeting the needs for qualified workers to fill the positions in emerging and growing fields. One such field is the nuclear industry. In fact, the nuclear industry is on the verge of a workforce crisis with a need for more than 57% of current radiation protection technicians (RPTs) in the United States to be replaced in the next ten years. The University of Missouri was awarded a Department of Labor grant to build an associates of applied science curriculum for the next generation of RPTs. After determining that the dominant approach to RPT training in the industry is via memorisation and recall, the question for the development team became how to best advance a vocational curriculum that provides innovative approaches to knowledge acquisition in meaningful contexts in an enterprise that has a relatively narrow view of learning. In the current article the process the curriculum development team underwent to approach this question is provided, along with the theoretical framework used to guide development of the curriculum and the resulting curricular design. The impact that this curriculum may have on higher order cognition and knowledge generalisation is discussed. Of particular note is the design and development of an ASK system, an online learning support system, to bolster the practical and theoretical aims of the curriculum. © 2008 The vocational Aspect of education Ltd.

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in cross-national comparisons of education and training systems. But how similar or different are national skill systems? To what extent, how, and why do they change? The public and scientific discourse about the modern “knowledge society” seems to imply that they will follow uniform trends rather than take specific pathways. Still, the attractiveness of particular national “models”may change over time, with varying success and different demands put on them. This leads to the following general questions: 1. Isthere one best way of organizing vocational training systems? 2. Howstable are national skill systems over time? 3. If systems are different, do relative advantages and disadvantages change over time? 4. To what extent can the systems be deliberately changed? This chapter analyzes the questions of the reproduction and transformation of skill systems from a sociological perspective by focusing on two particular cases. As a study on contemporary changes in skill systems, it emerges from an historical comparison of the skill formation systems in Germany and Britain sinceWorldWar II, with a special emphasis on developments during the 1990s.As advanced and economically competitive societies, Germany and Britain face, in principle, comparable economic challenges. When looking at these two cases more closely, however, one finds functionally equivalent solutions to similar problems as well as more specific problems and different economic strategies. © Cambridge University Press 2008 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.

This article describes how competence-based learning (CBL) can be organised in vocational education by integrating elements from a holistic instructional design model with recent ideas on assessment. A curriculum based on this model is pre-eminently suitable for an assessment approach emphasising that proof of competence is gathered by having learners perform authentic tasks under changing assessment conditions at regular intervals. The results are stored in a so-called electronic assessment portfolio. The portfolio is constructed according to the Protocol Portfolio Scoring (PPS). The value of PPS for flexible, demand-driven vocational education is discussed. © 2008 The vocational Aspect of education Ltd.

This article discusses the pedagogical relevance of a research project into professional subtitling practices in Italy which is coordinated by the author at the University of Bologna. The key feature of this initiative relates to its collaborative dynamics: research is carried out by students writing their final dissertations, working together as a team and pooling their resources and findings. The author contends that taking part in this collective enquiry-based experience is as important for the students as the actual results of their investigation and discusses in detail the pedagogical benefits of this approach. The article begins by describing the inception stages of the project, conceived as an attempt to capitalize on the traditionally high weighting of the final dissertation within Italian degree programmes - and hence on the important amount of effort that students are likely to put into it. After describing the pedagogical and research tools used in the project, the paper goes on to present the results achieved in the first 2-3 years of the project's life; illustrate how the students' work has influenced the author's teaching practices as a subtitler trainer; and evaluate the implications of this experience for translator training in general. © St. Jerome Publishing, Manchester.

The UK educational assessment landscape is changing, characterised by attempts to create more flexible pathways through learning. This has led to attempts to formalise the comparative relationships between different general and vocational qualifications. The National Qualifications Framework (NQF), the Framework for Achievement and the Framework for Higher education Qualifications in England, Wales and Northern Ireland all seek to explore the potential for comparing the value of different qualifications. These initiatives mirror other international trends, such as the implementation of the Australian Qualifications Framework. Grading is a potential enabling tool for comparing different qualifications. This is visible in the way that the NQF uses General Certificate of Secondary education grades C and D to discriminate between Levels 2 and 3 of the framework. This article focuses on the challenges posed for competency-based qualifications in the light of such national and international moves towards developing unified qualifications frameworks. This is important given the strong traditional relationship between competency-based qualifications and binary (pass/fail or competent/not yet competent) reporting and its historically ambivalent relationship with grading techniques. The article also discusses some of the particular issues that are relevant when competency-based assessments are graded. © 2008, UCU.