Good Practice in Technical and Vocational Education and Training

,

• Publisher: Asian Development Bank
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9789715618540
• eBook ISBN: 9789292547387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Many developing member countries (DMCs) of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) suffer from a shortage of qualified workers. Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) and skills development often provide a slow, inflexible, inadequate, and inefficient response to the needs of labor markets. This good practice guide supports ADB's education sector staff and other planners in their dialogue with governments and other stakeholders of education in the DMCs aimed at analyzing the TVET sector and its directions. The publication highlights strategic questions and presents investment design issues, including the strengths and weaknesses of different forms of training and financing. It discusses the lessons learned from ADB's experiences in the sector and their implications for future TVET projects. Checklists provide a practical tool for evaluating proposed investments.

Some Design Issues in TVET

This chapter examines the strengths and weaknesses of different forms of training and financing, including

• public training;

• nongovernment training;

• enterprise-based training;

• informal sector training, including traditional apprenticeships;

• training levies; and

• training funds.

Public Training Systems and Institutions

Public training provision comes in many forms, including vocational centers, technical secondary schools, technical colleges, polytechnics, and rural and community skills centers. Consequently, it is often difficult to generalize experiences and lessons learned in training provision.

Public training systems play a key role in skills provision worldwide, and the Asia and Pacific region is no exception. They continue to play a strategic role, particularly in meeting demands for skills vital to the economy and involving experimentation and innovations that can be adopted more widely. However, public training tends to be overwhelmingly formal, and formal training is overwhelmingly directed at modern-sector wage employment, which may absorb only a minority of those entering the labor market in many DMCs. Moreover, economic stagnation and insufficient financing of public provision have seriously constrained its quality (Table 6).

Table 6: Strengths and Weaknesses of Public Training

Strengths	Weaknesses
Stand-alone vocational training centers not regarded as part of the formal education system, giving them an advantage.	Focuses almost exclusively on the wage economy.
High demand for postsecondary technical education, e.g., polytechnics, in some countries.	Often not well linked to the employment market.
Public systems tend to be more evenly spread geographically in the country than private training, providing an equity advantage.	Tendency to inertia—because of isolation from the market and the long chain of command from the center to training institutions.
Staff, as members of the public service, tend to have job security.	Limited budgets lead to outdated equipment, infrequent repairs, and lack of consumable supplies—possible decapitalization.
	Staff often poorly motivated and poorly paid.
	Tendency for inefficient use of resources, such as low trainee-staff ratios.
	In short, typically lacking accountability for costs and results.

Source: Study team.

Public training provision often tends to be weak, irrelevant, ineffective, and inefficient. Formal TVET systems focus almost exclusively on the wage economy and often provide the wrong skills for the available employment. Outdated, centrally driven examinations reinforce the isolation from labor market requirements. Budget cuts have led to severe decapitalization in public training systems, which have had disastrous consequences on quality. High cost structures in TVET contribute to widespread inefficiencies. Management often pays no attention to costs and markets.

“Public VET [vocational education and training] systems reflect industry’s historical traditions of training, and a division of labor between the state and the private sector. Where the private sector has a strong commitment to training, public VET systems have played a crucial role in off-the-job training. Where employers have long preferred to acquire trainees through systems of selecting from unskilled and even casual labor (as in South Asia), formal VET provision has been widely seen as irrelevant to industry. As with school-based technical education, VET systems are much more in demand when economies are growing, and there are enabling industry and technology policies” (DFID 2007: 6).

The key question is how to reform public training systems to make them more market responsive and effective. The key design questions are how to change incentives and accountability for results. The management and financial reforms described in the previous chapter are the principal vehicles for reform. The principal constraints on reform are not usually the economics or technical aspects of management. Rather the constraints are political—the ability of a given government office to compel others to enact reforms.

Is the solution to privatize public training? In some cases, that may be appropriate. But public training has a vital role to play in areas where the state has a comparative advantage. Some public training is also needed in strategic skills to provide a model for private training as well as a venue for experimentation and reform. Still, inefficient public training systems cannot be allowed to continue wasting money on expensive training for obsolete, unmarketable skills. Public training should be made to respond to market incentives, e.g., by payment for results.

Nongovernment Training Provision

Essentially there are two types of nongovernment training provision: not-for-profit and for profit. The first is termed NGO-sponsored training here, and the latter private training. Table 7 presents the strengths and weaknesses of both.

Table 7: Strengths and Weaknesses of Nongovernment Training

Strengths	Weaknesses
Can extend access to skills acquisition by people without government subsidies, reducing pressure on public spending for skills development.	Wider range of quality than in public provision—at lower end many unregistered and unregulated providers are of dubious quality, wasting private spending.
Often more in tune with the labor market than public institutions, because private institutions can be unprofitable or go out of business if the market considers their products irrelevant or of low quality.	Inequity—fees often prevent enrollment by lower income groups.
May be able to start new training programs more quickly than government providers.	Private training tends to concentrate narrowly on low-cost courses such as business, accounting, languages, IT.
NGO institutions may provide training in higher cost occupations such as carpentry, auto mechanics, metalwork.	Obstacles to sustainability, or scaling up NGO initiatives (because initiatives depend on NGO leadership and staff commitment, which are not easily replicable).
NGO programs often target those not reached by public or private for-profit training providers (e.g., the poor in urban slums or rural areas, refugees, people with HIV/AIDS, those with special needs) (DFID 2007: 8).	Lack of information and choice—range of choices not well known to the public.
Useful to test innovations.
At the top end, quality of private provision tends to be better than government provision in many countries.

HIV/AIDS = human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, IT = information technology, NGO = nongovernment organization.

Source: Study team.

Private training providers work mostly in urban areas in less costly types of skills. First, government needs to regulate private training to minimize fraud, but it should do so without erecting needless barriers to entry or expansion. Where such barriers exist, government should eliminate or reduce them. The right balance must be struck between regulation and control. Too much control can stifle initiative. Governments typically underestimate the staff and other costs required to monitor and regulate private training. Second, government should define, require, and monitor quality assurance for private training. Quality varies more widely in private training than in the public sector. Government intervention is also needed to counter the market failure of information by providing better statistics on the size and scope of private training, its c...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Introduction
• Rationales
• Strategic Questions on TVET
• Some Design Issues in TVET
• Summing Up: Key Lessons and Their Application
• Appendix: Criteria for Evaluating Proposed TVET Investments
• References
• Useful Websites
• Back Cover