Toolkit: Skills and qualifications: Benefits for people

Introduction: What is this Toolkit about?

Читать на русском

Lire en français

This Toolkit is about skills and qualifications, and the benefits they provide for people in a changing environment. The world is undergoing a major transformation that requires new skills and qualifications, new ways for people to know about skills and qualifications, and new ways to acquire skills and qualifications. 

Usually, we work with policy makers in vocational education and training (VET), and related areas. With this Toolkit, we focus specifically on professionals in schools, companies, training centres, employment agencies and careers guidance settings. Our goal is to open a dialogue with and among professionals, because we believe that the success of policy change and reform in skills and qualifications is largely a function of the degree to which professionals are included, empowered and resourced to deliver change.

To discover what is happening in practice we recently launched an open call for success stories about the benefits of skills and qualifications. We received more than 450 responses mostly from ETF partner countries, as well as some from EU member states and other parts of the world.

A selection of these success stories appears in the Toolkit. They illustrate existing good practice, and how people benefit from it, showing that professionals, from school directors and teachers to careers counsellors and company managers, are the driving force behind success. From here on, we will just refer to ‘professionals’ to cover everyone involved in the design and delivery of skills and qualifications, and in the provision of careers information and guidance and careers counselling. 

We also look at the beneficiaries of skills and qualifications. We call them ‘learners’, short for lifelong learners, a term that applies to us all, throughout our lives, as we adjust to the rapidly changing world of employment and the risks and opportunities of new technologies. Skills and qualifications contribute to our personal development and employment, to our inclusion in society and to our mobility between education and jobs, within and between countries. But not everyone has access to these benefits, for a variety of reasons. We recognise that young and adult learners have different needs. However, we raise the same questions about both:

Do they have access to skills and qualifications?

Are they offered appropriate learning and guidance? 

All these elements –

the individual learners, workers and job-seekers, professionals in every area of lifelong learning and lifelong guidance, the policy makers and government institutions, social partners, employers, sector and regional bodies

and so on – are structural  parts of what is commonly known as the ‘skills ecosystem’. The ecosystem is a metaphor borrowed from biology, where it was first developed to describe living organisms and the physical environment within a certain area and – crucially – the relationships between them. This combination of structural elements and their complex, interdependent relationships is immediately recognisable in the context of skills, both as an ‘ecosystem’ in its own right and as an area within the wider education and training system. Monitoring and influencing the skills ecosystem is one of the keys to unlocking the potential of every country’s population, with their unique combinations of human capital, history, culture and natural resources.

How to use this Toolkit

This Toolkit is made up of ‘layers’ that you can consult on the table of contents on the right side of this page. This first layer is a ‘narrative’ which tells the overall story (see links below in English, French and Russian - it is our printed brochure). The second layer provides more information and explanation about specific topics.

You can access the second layer by using the table of contents. This will allow you to navigate through the Toolkit, and find the information that you need or are interested in, including examples of good practice, information sources, and other external links online.

We hope that you will be inspired to find out more about the issues involved and discuss them with colleagues, clients, students, teachers, friends and family. Because of the changes we are all facing today, it has never been more important for everybody to make the best possible decisions about skills and qualifications for the future. 

We only provide indicative, not comprehensive cases and references.

The Toolkit is still work in progress.

FIRST LAYER - BROCHURE

Available languages:

EN

RU

FR