Developments in five priority areas for VET, agreed in 2015 by the EU-28, Iceland, Norway, candidate countries, the European Commission and EU social partners, are at the centre of this report. Work in 2015-19 shows continuity with earlier national strategies and initiatives. It confirms the recent focus on apprenticeships and other forms of…

The current vocational education and training (VET) system in Portugal is the result of a 2007 large-scale reform, which reorganised VET into a single system (Sistema Nacional de Qualificações, SNQ). The main objectives of the SNQ are to ensure that VET qualifications better match labour market needs, promoting the competitiveness of enterprises,…

Adult basic education students manage adult responsibilities and obligations and personal goals related to school. They commit their time and limited resources and thus are investors in their own learning. As investors, their voices matter. When one countywide adult basic education program implemented a systemic plan to ask students upon entry…

This study deals with key determinants of participation in the nonformal education (NFE) of adults in the Czech Republic (CZE). Our results are based on a secondary analysis of two Adult Education Surveys carried out in the CZE in 2011 (n = 10,190) and 2016 (n = 12,272). Determinants of participation are modelled through logistic regression and…

Concise, clear and comprehensive snapshots of vocational education and training systems in EU, Iceland and Norway: this is what the Cedefop Spotlight on VET series offers. Building on individual country Spotlights, this publication provides an overview of VET systems with their distinctive qualities, such as main accession and progression routes…

This study is the first volume of Cedefop research on empowering adults through upskilling and reskilling pathways. It estimates the magnitude of the low-skilled adult population according to a broader conceptualisation which goes beyond educational attainment levels, and considers digital skills, literacy and numeracy, as well as skill loss and…

The Office of Workforce Development (OWD) in New Orleans, Louisiana, with a grant from the U.S. Department of Labor, implemented Career Pathways, an innovative program designed to increase the local talent pool and help lower-skilled, unemployed, and underemployed individuals train for work in growing fields. RAND Corporation researchers evaluated…

This short description contributes to better understanding vocational education and training (VET) in Croatia by providing insights into its main features and highlighting system developments and current challenges in recent years. In Croatia, vocational education and training (VET) is offered in the form of initial VET (IVET) and adult education.…

Lower-skilled workers in the United States face a shrinking pool of employment opportunities. To combat this, the city of New Orleans' Office of Workforce Development (OWD) developed a job training program with a grant, awarded in 2014, from the U.S. Department of Labor Workforce Innovation Fund. The program, Career Pathways, was designed to help…

Investing in community college workforce training is a central part of the Biden administration's agenda for improving the lives of American families. Now more than ever, as the nation's economy enters a post-pandemic period of significant organizational and technological change, community colleges are well-situated to help millions of low-income…

This report is the second volume of Cedefop research on empowering adults through upskilling and reskilling pathways. It presents the Cedefop analytical framework for developing upskilling pathways for low-skilled adults and illustrates its conceptual development. The analytical framework is aimed at supporting policymakers and stakeholders in…

This article outlines the results of a qualitative study, which investigated the adult non-formal education and education (NFET) centre linkages with external role-players in providing post-training support for the employment of graduates. The concern that informed this article is that adults who face long-term unemployment remain unemployed after…

This report presents findings from a feasibility evaluation of the Bridges to Pathways (Bridges) program. Bridges was a program for young men in Chicago between the ages of 17 and 21 years who were involved with the criminal or juvenile justice system and lacked a high school credential. The program offered intensive mentoring and case management,…

The Pathways for Academic Career and Employment (PACE) program is established to provide funding to community colleges for the development of programs that will lead to gainful, quality, in-state employment for members of target populations by providing them with both effective academic and employment training to ensure gainful employment and…

This paper investigates whether on-the-job training has an effect on the employability of workers. Using data from the Netherlands we disentangle the true effect of training incidence from the spurious one determined by unobserved individual heterogeneity. We also take into account that there might be feedback from shocks in the employment status…