This paper looks at the importance of mechanisms that give formal recognition to vocational skills acquired through work-based learning and how such mechanisms might be developed. It describes how skill recognition can benefit individuals, employers and society as a whole, and identifies in which contexts skill recognition has the highest…

Employers believe high school graduates have inadequate reading, writing, math, thinking, and communication skills. A declining number of good jobs for first-time workers can be attributed to employers' focus on retraining their remaining employees or in recruiting skilled and otherwise qualified workers who were laid off because of other…

Many work-bound youths have poor work habits and poor basic skills in reading, writing, and mathematics. Many work-bound youths, especially minorities and females, spend their first years after school unemployed or job hopping, with consequent loss of training and productivity. These problems are becoming more serious because minorities and…

This document contains four papers on issues in human resource development (HRD). "Employability By Sector of Industry: Taking Account of Supply and Demand Characteristics (Andries de Grip, Jasper B. van Loo, Jos M.A.F. Sanders) reports on development of an Industry Employability Index that integrates both supply and demand determinants of…