2nd RECOTVET Regional Policy Dialogue on TVET Personnel

Background

The aim of the Southeast Asia Regional Policy Network (SEARPN) on Education and Skills is to foster knowledge exchange in support of national growth and regional integration by encouraging a whole-of-government approach to the formation and implementation of sound skills policies. The SEARPN on Education and Skills builds on the platform of the OECD’s Employment and Skills Strategies in Southeast Asia (ESSSA), which has been networking skills ministries from ASEAN Member States since 2008. With the growing participation by Southeast Asian countries in the OECD’s international education surveys and local job creation policy reviews, the SEARPN on Education and Skills can provide valuable comparative data and analysis to help countries in the region to build more efficient and effective employment and skills systems.

To that end, the 2015 expert meeting on “Better Connecting the Skills System to the World of Work,” was jointly organised by the Kingdom of Cambodia’s Ministry of Labour and Vocational Training, the OECD, and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). The meeting also served as GIZ’s Second Regional Policy Dialogue on TVET Personnel as part of the latter’s new regional programme, RECOTVET (Regional Cooperation Programme to Improve the Training of TVET Personnel), which aims at supporting and creating personnel, institutional and thematic preconditions for quality improvement and regional harmonisation of the education and training of TVET personnel in South East Asia.

Objectives

The collaboration between OECD and RECOTVET in preparing this Expert Meeting was successful in pursuing ways to overcome gaps between skills systems and labour markets by enabling the mobility of workers, enhancing the involvement of private sector and strengthening the governance structures of vocational education systems. The intensified regional cooperation between executive and professional staff concerned with TVET from across the ASEAN region will make national TVET systems more effective and TVET quality regionally comparable. For this reason, the expert meeting chose to focus on:

• Better understanding what is known about educational attainment and skills challenges in the region;
• Strengthening the quality and relevance of TVET and work-based learning;
• Best practices for engaging the private sector and easing the transition of youth from school to work; and,
• Making TVET more inclusive to disadvantaged groups.