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Articles |
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TVET institutions just like most educational institutions have yet to learn to look at learners as customers. Time is passing us by and if TVET public institutions fail to respond to their customers’ needs, they will end up with very few students who cannot pay, equipment that are no longer in use in industry and faculty whose knowledge and experience are mostly from what they have learned when they were students. The challenge to look at students as customers and the institutions as service providers is difficult for decision makers, often detached |
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Information for TVET Practitioners |
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from the market economy to understand, much more, face head on. |
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Employer Based Training (EBT) is at the foundation of a nation’s economic success. Singapore is a regional model in EBT that is interesting and important to study. While no one country’s model fits easily in a second country, we can look to those with vibrant economies for lessons to be learned. |
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In some countries, publicly funded technician education is on the verge of bankruptcy and irrelevance. Buildings are decaying, ancient equipment is unusable, students register only if they have been turned down by every other option in post secondary education and employers turn up their noses! Yet, in other countries, the reverse is the case. Systems are growing rapidly, state of the art equipment is crowding labs and well qualified students including masses of university graduates are lining up to get in. Naturally, the level of development of each country has some impact on this. But some countries struggling to develop their economies have dynamic TVET systems while others languish, so stage of development is not the sole cause of these differences….. |
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Questions TVET institutions need to address: What skills and traits do employers value most in prospective entry-level employees? What TVET strategies has practice shown to be effective in passing on employability skills and traits to students? |
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In rethinking TVET, there is the constant challenge that very little research has been done on the relationship between skills development and culture. How do we go about developing systems that fit into the country’s culture, values, traditions and social interaction as well as its particular level of development?
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