Conference Agenda

The demand for workers in the labour market is changing as a result of the integration of different megatrends: digital, green and demographic (Opik et al., 2018). There is therefore a particular need to develop systems for forecasting labour demand. Matching skills supply and demand is crucial for the development of education, economic development and inclusion policies.

To this end, Cedefop has developed a system that provides comprehensive estimates of labour market trends up to 2030 in all EU Member States. However, it has two limitations. First, its estimates are not directly linked to the system of skills provision, including Initial Vocational Education and Training (IVET). IVET is of particular interest because of its strategic importance for industrial development and employment (Spöttl & Windelband, 2021). This importance is growing in some countries (Germany, Denmark, Austria) with a high share of the labour force with post-secondary vocational education (Hoeckel & Schwartz, 2010).

Similarly, the data it provides is at the national level. In this respect, the regional level offers a particularly appropriate scenario for analysing the dynamics generated between human capital and development (Canal Dominguez, 2021; Sevinc et al., 2020). Some authors have also highlighted the relevance of technical profiles linked to Vocational Education and Training studies (ILO, 2012) as conducive to regional development (Navarro, 2014; (Retegi & Navarro, 2018; Spöttl & Windelband, 2021). Finally, within the same country, at the regional level, there may be significant differences between VET systems, both in terms of both supply and demand for VET workers (Moso-Diez et al., 2022).

For all the above reasons, the main contribution of the article is to present a new methodology for estimating the degree of horizontal mismatch of graduates with VET studies per Spanish region between 2020 and 2030, by economic sector (NACE code letter). This type of mismatch, known as ‘horizontal mismatch’ (Robst, 2007), occurs when the job held by a worker is not related to his or her field of study. This type of discrepancy is also known as ‘field-of-study mismatch’. This allows us to check whether VET fields of knowledge are properly aligned with labour market demand at regional level...

Among other things, the proper matching of supply and demand in the labour market can increase the productivity of firms because, when individuals are well matched to their occupations, the knowledge and skills that are acquired through education are optimally used in the labour market (Somers et al., 2019). This model is built based on Cedefop estimates and the Spanish Labour Force Survey, two accessible sources that would allow it to be replicated and improved for the rest of the regions in all EU-27 countries.

The current VET policy and practice orthodoxy is not working despite the efforts of educators and learners. The futures for which VET is intended to prepare people are ever more precarious at the individual, societal and planetary levels. While better futures are possible, VET is poorly positioned to respond to the new skilling needs these will require.

Therefore, we ask 1) what a VET system would look like that could play a supportive role in just transitioning and 2) what implications this question has for a future-oriented research agenda for VET.

Our research foregrounds the skills ecosystems approach, drawing most from Spours and his four key elements: collaborative horizontalities, facilitating verticalities, mediation through common mission and ecosystem leadership, and ecological time.

In expanding the approach to African contexts, we find the basic analytical tools hold. Nonetheless, we extend the approach significantly.

We argue for a strong ontological grounding in constructing such ecosystems and including some of what has historically been excluded from VET thinking and praxis (e.g., a wider notion of work). We offer three main dimensions.

1. Our more explicit engagement with political ecology points to further development of an account of VET’s purpose distinct from the productivist–human capital origins that permeates VET thinking. We make an axiological and ontological move by arguing VET’s purpose should encompass furthering collective human flourishing and integral human development.

2. We make the realtional aspect more explicit through application of notions of relational agency and relational capability.

3. We draw on critical realism to underpin how we see the interaction of vertical and horizontal. By drawing on Bhaskar’s laminated approach, we can address the question of how levels interact.

Whilst social ecosystems thinking proved useful, it did not provide sufficient conceptual tools to drive our work. Rather, it provided the middle layer of our conceptual approach. At a more generalised level, we located our expansion of the approach in critical realism.

In our empirical work, we adopted a further set of lenses.

1. We addressed informality, reflecting the majority reality of global economic life. The settings we researched included large numbers of actors, simultaneously engaged in enterprise activities and living lives as humans; always operating in complex relational webs. In such settings, anchor institutions are hard to find. Rather, we saw network catalysts, providing frameworks for fractal processes of deepening relationality. We explored the dynamism of young people’s navigational capabilities for finding new paths through living, working and learning. Their use of relationships and social media were apparent.

2. We considered the part played by vocational teachers, taking an expansive view of who counted as such. We see tthem as central to all ecosystem aspects, as interpreters of curriculum, scaffolders of learning and connectors to work. We explore the importance teachers place on building horizontal relationships within and across institutions and community organisations.

3. We examined how the ecosystem approach could inform the education–to–work transitions debate. In agreeing with those who problematise such transitions and point to nonlinear and blocked transitions, and the role of intersectional inequality therein, we considered questions of how the vertical and horizontal, and mediation between them, contribute to facilitating transitions. Indeed, in more formal or hybrid labour market contexts, anchor organisations remain crucial. Here, leadership was being provided by diverse learning institutions including VET institutions. How localised colearning networks can be support became an important focus.

4. We considered universities' roles in supporting skills ecosystems and localised colearning networks. Through our experience as actors in skills ecosytems, we explore universities' potential to make verticalities more facilitating through the particular advantages that they have in convening other actors.

Costa Rica is recognized as one of the Latin American countries that invests the most in education. According to the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report 2016-2017, Costa Rica's education system ranks 35th in the world, one of the highest in Latin America. However, most students in Costa Rica leave school with a weak foundation for work, amid concerns about low productivity and skills shortages (OECD, 2016), compounded by the fact that Costa Rica is the OECD country with the highest unemployment rate (34.2%) among 15-24 year-olds (ILO, 2022). To resume economic growth, Costa Rica needs a labour force with the competencies and skills demanded by the labour market and a TVET system that meets this need. One of the main institutions active in technical and vocational education and training (TVET) in Costa Rica is the Ministry of Public Education (Ministerio de Educación Pública - MEP) and the National Institute for Apprenticeships (Instituto Nacional de Aprendizaje – INA) (Rommel & Vargas Méndez, 2022). However, employers argue that there are insufficient graduates in technical specialties of increasing labour market demand. Furthermore, there is a lack in the supply of skilled TVET teachers in order to strength the quality of TVET. For example, not all teachers of TVET have vocational pedagogical and subject didactic competencies (Álvarez-Galván, 2015). This has brought the demand for more research on TVET to the center in Costa Rica. At the same time, it can be observed that, despite the growing attention from the political and economic side, a development of theoretical and methodological approaches on TVET and its scientifical knowledge does not take place. Although TVET is considered as an important and valuable alternative for the insertion of the young population in the labor market with a growing importance for the society, the relevance of TVET research is not yet that present so that research efforts have remained in the background (Alvarado Calderón & Mora Hernández, 2020). Lascarez & Baumann (2018) state that TVET research in Costa Rica is still in its infancy and that there is still no university chair conducting TVET research.

In Germany, for example, TVET is supported by the academic sub-discipline of TVET research and is characterized by chairs, courses of study in TVET teacher qualification, its own research community, academic journals and appropriate support for young researchers. Thus, although the Costa Rican discourse on TVET has typical elements such as the currently formulated need for TVET research and existing courses of study in TVET teacher education, as well as some academic scientific research efforts, this has not yet led to the promotion or institutionalization of a specific TVET-related scientific focus. This paper deals with the status and needs of TVET research in Costa Rica within the framework of the CoRiVET - Costa Rican Vocational Education and Training Project, funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research. The project aims to actualize the current curriculum on teacher qualification for TVET at the National Technical University (UTN) and to further institutionalized TVET research. In order to fulfil this last objective, a diagnosis of the current state of research on TVET will be carried out, which will provide updated information to detect in which sub-themes of TVET it is necessary to make greater research efforts in the future. In this context CoRiVET deals with the question: What is the status of TVET research in Costa Rica and which are the associated research needs for TVET?