Empirical Research in Vocational Education and Training

Background: The number of registered apprentices in Canada more than doubled between 1995 and 2007, yet successful completion of apprenticeship programs increased by only about one-third as much. Uncovering the factors related to low completion rates is a necessary first step to ensuring that today'…

The integration of disadvantaged youth into the labour market is a challenging policy issue. Since young people gain most from work experience and learning provided by firms, hence within apprenticeships, firms play a crucial role in training disadvantaged youths. Knowing firm characteristics that m…

Using a sample of graduates from a unique employee survey, this paper analyses the individual effects of double qualifications, i.e. of first taking up vocational training after obtaining the German upper secondary school-leaving certificate (Abitur) instead of going straight on to university. Our e…

Due to widely spread distrust in the signalling value of school grades, Swiss employers require external standardised aptitude test results in the process of recruiting new apprentices. However, the predictive quality of such tests has never been thoroughly researched. Therefore, this case study ana…

This paper applies Lazear's skill-weights approach (2009) to analyze the specificity of skill combinations of various occupations and its effects on occupational mobility and wages. The results show that the more specific an occupation, the smaller the probability of an occupational change. We also …

In this paper, we use unique firm-level data to calculate a monetary value of the firm-specific component of German apprenticeship training. We do this by comparing the initial productivities and wages of externally recruited and internally trained workers in the same job, occupation and firm. We ar…

From a public policy perspective where the aim is to increase the number of employers providing Apprenticeships in a system which provides policy makers with few demand side levers the most persuasive argument policy makers can craft is one based on demonstrating that investing in Apprenticeships wi…

Education policymakers are currently faced with the challenge of enabling young people with learning difficulties to achieve an upper-secondary level qualification. Switzerland has introduced a new type of combined school/ work-based VET programme that lasts two years. One of the key pre-requi-sites…

Dual apprenticeship training is a form of education at the upper secondary level, taking place in vocational school as well as in firms. Therefore, the willingness of firms to offer apprenticeships is a necessity for the functioning of this part of the educational system. Although it is likely that …

A salient feature of the 'training market' through which public training programmes are often organised is the external inspection of training providers. The inspection of providers of Apprenticeship training in England has been shown to focus more on procedural than on substantive attributes. From …

The existing empirical evidence on the relationship between apprenticeships, initial workplace training and economic downturns, is relatively scarce. The bottom line of this literature is that ratio of apprentices to employees tends to be (mildly) pro-cyclical and to decline during a recession, with…