China is experiencing an unprecedented phenomenon: breakneck industrialization on a scale and at a pace not seen before. It is trying to achieve in just a few decades what Western nations took more than a century to do. The arrival in the country’s cities of tens of millions of rural dwellers, at most semi-skilled, has put huge strain on the country’s system of vocational education, known as TVET. How have the Chinese authorities and their education administrators responded? Is China’s TVET system adapting to the rapidly evolving needs of its industry? Using the province of Yunnan as a subject, this detailed case study is a closely argued and sanguine analysis of the operation of TVET in China. The authors deployed a set of internationally comparable criteria to offer a searching assessment of current performance, at the same time documenting areas of strength and weakness. The question the authors’ methodology answers is how well China’s TVET system is performing compared to technical and vocational education structures in other countries. In fact, they discover that in Yunnan, a province representative of the challenges faced nationwide, much has indeed been done, from a wholesale overhaul of programs to make them relevant to industry requirements, to major investment in infrastructure. Teacher training has been reformed, and take-up of professional master’s and doctoral courses has been encouraged. Joint initiatives with bodies such as UNESCO have improved training and vocational education at high school level. While there is a strong international history of such comparative evaluations, which are essential for policy makers to benchmark their administration, few studies have included China despite the enormous amount of value that can be learned from that country’s experience. This work will provide vital material for researchers, governments and development agencies alike.

Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) research has become a recognized and well-defined area of interdisciplinary research. This is the first handbook of its kind that specifically concentrates on research and research methods in TVET. The book’s sections focus on particular aspects of the field, starting with a presentation of the genesis of TVET research. They further feature research in relation to policy, planning and practice. Various areas of TVET research are covered, including on the vocational disciplines and on TVET systems. Case studies illustrate different approaches to TVET research, and the final section of the book presents research methods, including interview and observation methods, as well as of experimentation and development. This handbook provides a comprehensive coverage of TVET research in an international context, and, with special focus on research and research methods, it is a cutting-edge resource and reference.

This book provides insight into the history and current status of teaching in technical and vocational education across a broad range of countries. It contains studies of the profiles of teachers and lecturers and their educational practices. An overarching introduction embeds the content of the book into the current global context of Technical and Vocational Education and Training. This is the first substantial volume on the topic in 30 years.

This book brings together a broad range of approaches and methodologies relevant to international comparative vocational education and training (VET). Revealing how youth in transition is affected by economic crises, it provides essential insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the various systems and prospects of VET in contexts ranging from North America to Europe, (e.g. Spain, Germany or the UK) to Asia (such as China, Thailand and India). Though each country examined in this volume is affected by the economic crisis in a different way, the effects are especially apparent for the young generation. In many countries the youth unemployment rate is still very high and the job perspectives for young people are often limited at best. The contributions in this volume demonstrate that VET alone cannot solve these problems, but can be used to support a smooth transition from school to work. If the quality of VET is high and the status and job expectations are good, VET can help to fill the skills gap, especially at the intermediate skill level. Furthermore, VET can also offer a realistic alternative to the university track for young people in many countries.

China’s rise as an aid provider in Africa has caught global attention, with China’s activity being viewed as the projection of soft power of a neo-colonialist kind in an international relations context. This book, which focuses on China’s education aid—government scholarships, training, Confucius Institutes, dispatched teachers, etc., reveals a much more complicated picture. It outlines how the divide between the Chinese Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Education hinders China’s soft power projection, how much of China’s aid is bound up with an education-for-economic-growth outlook, mirroring China’s own recent experiences of economic development, and how China’s aid—prioritized to reflect the commercial sector’s interests—is out of step with most international development aid, which is dominated by education agendas and the campaigns of international organizations and traditional donors; this leaves China easily exposed to the charge of neo-colonialism. This situation also reveals insufficient knowledge production of China and in South-South Cooperation. Substantial production of Southern knowledge should recognize the international development cooperation architecture as an open system by which both traditional donors and Southern countries transform.

This book investigates the endogenous forces in the relation of “One Belt and One Road” and educational development in China. The conceptual framework of analyzing the relations offers an in-depth understanding of the vocational education, higher education system, and basic education system, locally, nationally, and internationally. The current situations, problems, and strategies of addressing the relation of “One Belt and One Road” and educational development in China have been explored in this book.

The transition from school to vocational education is of different quality and performance in the diverse national VET systems and heavily determined by the different structures of governance in the national education and VET systems. In September 2009, the International Network on Innovative Apprenticeship (INAP) hosted its third international conference in Turin bringing together leading researchers in the area of international TVET research. This book summarises all topics discussed within the frame of the Turin conference and overviews current research and analysis in the following fields: Managing successful transitions from school to work * Building vocational identity * Competence evaluation and development in VET * Levels of governance and the role of stakeholders in apprenticeships

The transferability of vocational education and training qualifications across international borders is a live issue in this heterogeneous field. Key to this goal is defining a common methodology for measuring vocational competences. This publication sets out a proposal for just that, based on the results of a pilot project known as ‘COMET’ on competence diagnostics in the field of electrical engineering. The study deploys longitudinal analysis to explore issues of competence development, the development of vocational identity, and occupational commitment. It focuses on two discrete occupational profiles in electrical engineering in an ambitious test of a model currently applied to other professions as well. The model’s success in its first phase is detailed in the second part of the volume, where the authors show that the transfer of the competence framework into an empirical model was successful. They also demonstrate that the methodology can be applied to designing and evaluating vocational education and training processes, making the material relevant to VET teachers and trainers as well as academics. With its first section comprising a full description of the theoretical framework, this book is a significant step forward in an urgent task facing administrations, labor forces and employers around the world. The achievement is in proportion to the notorious complexities of a field whose diversity makes tough demands on large-scale methods of assessment.