Beyond employer engagement: measuring education-employment linkage in vocational education and training programmes

The effectiveness of vocational education and training (VET) depends on the quality of interactions between the actors from the education and employment systems, which ensure the correspondence of skills supply and demand. This paper develops an instrument to measure education-employment linkage (EEL) by capturing EEL in each sub-process where these actors can and should interact. Surveying VET experts from 18 countries suggests that countries with dual VET have the highest EEL, while the included Asian countries score lowest in terms of EEL. The analysis further reveals that the three most important sub-processes are employer involvement in the definition of qualification standards; employer involvement in deciding the timing of curriculum updates; and the combination of workplace training with classroom education.