You are kindly invited to use the table of content on your right to navigate.
Social partnerships are forms of collaboration where social partners work with VET actors at the national, regional or local level to constantly improve the alignment between VET and the skills needs in the labour market. To this end, they engage in and contribute to dialogue on VET policy and provision. The social partners are organisations that represent the interests of employers or employees. They include trade unions and employer federations, as well as chambers of commerce and business associations which represent the interests of their members in specific sectors or regions. The partnerships themselves are often tripartite in nature. They not only involve social partners and VET institutions, but actors from government and public administration at the national or sub-national level with an interest in issues such as local growth, job-creation or entrepreneurial development.
The need to work with social partners often emerges in the course of developing a national plan for VET reform, ideally as part of a vision building and road mapping process such as that presented in the area 2 of the VET Governance Toolkit, where forging such partnerships is seen as a way to address issues such as persistent skill gaps or difficulties that employers may have in finding suitably skilled graduates. At the time of creating the roadmap or action plan, further work is inevitably required to understand the available options for social partnerships and embark on the path towards establishing them, beginning with pilots, for example, and working up to wider adoption based on the experience gained.
The formal Review of Institutional Arrangements can be of great assistance in starting down this path. These can help in assessing the capability of the system to engage social partners in systematic and purposeful dialogue on issues such as VET policy in relation to training courses, curricula and qualifications, occupational standards and the need for active labour market measures. Contributing to policy-related dialogue demands a great deal from social partners, and dedicated capacity-building measures may also be required. The ETF has therefore developed a framework for capacity building for use by social partners to support them in developing the capacity of their members at the individual level. The contribution of social partners is not limited to participation in dialogue and the provision of advice. It can also include inputs into VET financing or the provision of access to resources, such as equipment or advanced training facilities, and opportunities for work-based learning. Many of these contributions are based on the use of public-private partnerships (PPPs).
The ETF has developed a range of tools to help partner countries understand the need for social partnerships. These include a position paper which explains the importance of cooperation with social partners in the design, delivery and financing of VET services. In addition, the policy brief summarises who the social partners are, why they need to be involved in VET, what form their involvement should take, and what decision makers can do to improve their participation.
The Public-Private Partnerships offers a thematic overview of the types of stable collaborations to co-design, co-finance and co-produce endeavours of common interest whose outcomes are beneficial for the learners. The ETF Yearbook consists of essays on key issues related to social partnership, and provides a vision of how these may evolve in future to remain relevant in a global knowledge economy.
The section ‘In practice’ illustrates the application of social partnership in VET. The Sectoral Skills Councils are stable formal structures that play a role in skills needs assessment and anticipation. A policy brief illustrates the basic ideas whereas case studies refer to Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Moldova. In the piloting of Sectoral Skills Councils in Belarus, the immediate goal was the development of occupational standards and a framework for sectoral qualifications for the IT and Managerial Services sectors. It furthermore provides reports on the application of tools for skills needs analysis to the ICT sector in the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in Serbia, as well as a study on the construction sector in the Ukrainian city of Lviv. A further means of support is provided by a report on the status of, and context for developing, VET-related social partnerships in countries of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean, namely Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, the Palestinian Occupied Territories and Tunisia.
Public and private stakeholder cooperation in VET has been growing in the 2010s in the ETF partner countries. A strong motivation for the private sector to engage in VET has been the mismatch between the skills that VET systems provide and the demands in the labour market, according to Torino Process analyses these years.
Where social partners are active (and with them professional organisations, chambers, youth and teacher associations, etc.) VET attains better results. However, the institutionalisation of the many examples of social partnership in VET is proving difficult. This is in particular the case in countries where the tradition of social dialogue is more recent, is absent or has been disrupted.
How to look at the future?
Leadership is surely among the relevant factors that can bring advance. However, are the partnerships that create a favourable terrain to the sustainability of outcomes. Trust between institutions and between actors is key, hence in my view leader-follower relationship alone is not going to suffice in the long-term.
Building dialogue and partnership in VET requires some investment in institutional innovation: there is no necessity to replicate the same institutional solutions that work in other countries. Action-learning, tolerance for failures, non-financial incentives such as recognising to social partners the status of interlocutors, and financial incentives where useful are important too.