Vocational education and training (VET) programmes are facing rapid change and intensifying challenges. How can employers and unions be engaged? How can workbased learning be used? How can teachers and trainers be effectively prepared? How should postsecondary programmes be structured? The country reports in this series look at these and other…

The "Hamburg Declaration" (UNESCO, 1997) is perhaps most quixotic and prescient in laying out the changing world of work as envisioned in 1997. It includes particular commitments to promote the rights to work and to work-related adult learning, to increase access to work-related adult learning for different target groups, and to…

Electronic portfolios (ePortfolios) are a student focused tool which support and evidence work-integrated learning (WIL) experiences and capabilities in a tertiary education setting. Such settings are increasingly faced by a regulatory framework requiring evidence of student competency and skill acquisition. The commitment of educational…

Purpose: This paper aims to problematise practice and contribute to new understandings of professional and workplace learning. Practice is a concept which has been largely taken for granted and under-theorised in workplace learning and education research. Practice has usually been co-located with classifiers, such as legal practice, vocational…

The Apprenticeship Student Outcomes (APPSO) Survey, which targets former apprenticeship students who have completed the final level of their technical training, is one of three annual surveys that make up BC Student Outcomes. In British Columbia, it is projected that there will be nearly one million job openings by 2022, with 43 percent requiring…

In recent time, graduates from the nation's tertiary institution of learning most especially the business education graduates have been plagued by the inability to get jobs in corporate industries and companies in Nigeria. Many authors and researchers have related this problem to the quality of training received by these graduates while in school…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of intergenerational learning as a way for organizations to deal with an ageing worker population in a positive and constructive way. Design/methodology/approach: The paper employs a thematic synthesis of qualitative literature and considers all types of sources including quantitative…

This article considers the role of reflective practice in work-based learning in higher education. The benefits of using reflection for learning at work have been widely recognised and the pedagogy to support reflection is now established. However, the use of reflective practice has been subjected to considerable critique, and many of the…

A theoretical framework for understanding applied learning processes is now warranted given the frequency with which these processes are now being utilised. Drawing in part from the literature on applied education in schools as well as theories of vocational learning such a framework is offered here that seeks to explain these learning processes…

The relationship between learning and innovation has been a central theme in studies of innovation (Fagerberg et al., 2005, Borras & Edquist, 2014, Lundvall & Johnsen, 1994). Studies of the workplace have also claimed a relationship between skills or training and a firm's ability to innovate (Toner, 2011). Recent studies of innovation in…

The notion of "openness" in terms like open distance learning (ODL) is sometimes rather carelessly used, for example in the work-integrated learning (WIL) of distance learners (such as the teaching practice of UNISA's education students, where schools and UNISA form a partnership). We indicate that there is very little…

Contemporary global transitions are remaking education as a social institution and re-positioning educators in a lifelong learning political order. In this paper, I reflect on a research project that investigated the teaching occupation in learning societies in order to explain the concept of "educational work": the form of labour that…

The article examines the aims of the workplace-based learning of prospective preschool teachers in Iceland and associated cooperative practices between the University of Iceland and preschools. A "third space" of collaboration between these two sites is considered necessary if the education of preschool student teachers is to be…

Student feedback is essential to maintaining quality and relevance in the education system. Through surveying former students, BC Student Outcomes provides the information needed to help shape post-secondary education in British Columbia. Every year, BC Student Outcomes collects feedback from former students who took post-secondary programs,…

Sound initial vocational education is an important precondition for subsequent episodes of vocational education or professional development. The presence of strong occupational identities and labour markets is argued to be a precondition for high-quality initial vocational education and training (IVET) and continuing vocational education and…