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Vocational Skills Development - The key to employment and income

Vocational skills development (VSD) can make a decisive contribution to and have a widespread impact on poverty reduction. The aim is to provide people with the skills they need to take part in economic life, and open up new opportunities for productive employment and access to appropriately paid work.

Vocational skills development – together with basic education – is one of the main preconditions for economic and social development. The poorest and most socially vulnerable segments of population are usually excluded from economic life because they lack the necessary qualifications. Targeted offers and measures in the field of vocational skills development for young people and adults are an important way of providing access to employment and income, and hence promote a self-determined way of life. For more than 30 years, the promotion of vocational skills development has been one of the priorities of SDC's activities in developing countries and emerging economies.

Current challenges
In many developing countries, the range of vocational skills development opportunities is insufficient. Existing options are usually limited to urban areas. Apprenticeships tend to be designed for the formal sector and are not sufficiently geared to economic demand. Moreover, there are high formal access barriers to be overcome. Dynamic economic development necessitates flexible training and further education opportunities. These must enhance not only specific professional skills but also basic personal competences and social skills. The situation of poor and disadvantaged population groups also requires the development of appropriate opportunities accessible to people with low elementary schooling. They should enable the reintegration of unemployed persons in the job market, address the needs of the informal market as well as of persons living in rural regions, and in particular promote self-employment. It is also important to ensure a good level of basic education which vocational skills development can build on and consolidate, where necessary. Finally, appropriate opportunities of advancing to further studies in the formal system should also be promoted.

Swiss development cooperation has made adjustments to meet these challenges and now pursues a broad-based, flexible approach to promote the development of skills and competences which can be acquired through different pathways: through school-based and workplace-based education and training, within and outside the formal education system, e.g. practice in the workplace and self-learning.

The SDC focus SDC’s work is based on the concept of vocational skills development. Its activities are aimed at the poorest and most vulnerable sections of the population, with emphasis on young people and women as well as rural populations. By coordinating and integrating its activities with other education-related activities in a country, SDC endeavours to establish an efficient, flexible educational system that addresses local requirements and understands and supports the need for lifelong learning. The specific aims of SDC include: Promotion of access to vocational training opportunities, particularly for poor and disadvantaged segments of the population. This requires a significant increase in the range of available training offers of vocational skills development, which is only possible with the involvement of private training providers. SDC supports the development and adaptation of national standards governing the activities and quality of public and private training providers. SDC supports different ways of making training options more widely available and affordable, e.g. by reducing entrance barriers, supporting innovative teaching and learning methods, expanding and adapting such options for rural regions, and including business expertise in the curriculum in order to promote self-employment. Promotion of the relevance and quality of vocational skills development opportunities by bringing them more into line with market demands. This can be done by gearing them to local and regional economic conditions, encouraging the involvement of private companies in developing occupational profiles and financing further education, and developing flexible further training options that enable employees to adapt to the changing requirements of the job market (lifelong learning).

Theme contact: Simon Junker

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Additional themes in this area:

 Gender and vocational skills development
Women suffer disproportionately from unemployment and underemployment. It is therefore all the more important to create employment and income opportunities for women by providing vocational skills development offers.