Skill Formation: Interdisciplinary and Cross-National Perspectives

TRENDS AND CHALLENGES Changes in the demand for skills and qualifications in the workplace have been a constant feature of economies since the onset of industrialization. Shifts of manpower among the sectors of agriculture, manufacturing and services, changes in technology, increasing specialization, and growth in firm size and expansion of managerial control have also brought about changes in the vocational and professional skills required. In the twentieth century, broad social changes, such as the growing labor force participation of women and the ever-increasing level of educational enrollments, have been triggered by these varying demands for labor and have also strongly contributed to them. For a long time, the adaptation of vocational and professional training to these changes has essentially taken the form of extension (i.e., by increasing levels of participation at ever more advanced levels of general schooling) in early training periods for occupations both inside and outside the workplace and in further training. Mostly, such training concentrated in the late teens and then extended into the early if not mid-twenties. However, there was little change in that people made their longer skill investments for just one occupation and expected that these would serve them through most, if not even all, of their working lives. In recent decades, the pressures for more and better skills have greatly intensified both in regard to the extent and kind of skill acquisition, especially in the so-called advanced societies in the West and their new Southeast Asian rivals (Bamber & Lansbury, 1998).