White Paper

An OECD study of vocational education and training designed to help countries make their systems more responsive to labour market needs. It expands the evidence base, identifies a set of policy options and develops tools to appraise VET policy initiatives.

This 2009 edition of the OECD Employment Outlook provides an annual assessment of labour market developments and prospects in member countries. This issue focuses on the jobs crisis in particular and looks at steps taken by governments to help workers and the unemployed. It recommends ways of preventing current high levels of unemployment becoming entrenched. The first chapter looks at the jobs crisis itself, analysing the implications for employment and social policy. The second chapter looks at how industry, firm, and worker characteristics shape job and worker flows. The third chapter examines the problem of the working poor, now exacerbated by the crisis. And the fourth examines pathways on to and off of disability benefits, a growing problem in most OECD countries. As in previous editions, a comprehensive statistical annex provides the latest data.

Today’s societies place challenging demands on individuals, who are confronted with complexity in many parts of their lives. What do these demands imply for key competencies that individuals need to acquire? Defining such competencies can improve assessments of how well-prepared young people and adults are for life’s challenges, as well as identify overarching goals for education systems and lifelong learning. A competency is more than just knowledge and skills. It involves the ability to meet complex demands, by drawing on and mobilising psychosocial resources (including skills and attitudes) in a particular context. For example, the ability to communicate effectively is a competency that may draw on an individual’s knowledge of language, practical IT skills and attitudes towards those with whom he or she is communicating. Individuals need a wide range of competencies in order to face the complex challenges of today’s world, but it would be of limited practical value to produce very long lists of everything that they may need to be able to do in various contexts at some point in their lives. Through the DeSeCo Project, the OECD has collaborated with a wide range of scholars, experts and institutions to identify a small set of key competencies, rooted in a theoretical understanding of how such competencies are defined

Recent stories of soaring student debt levels and under-placed college graduates have caused some to question whether a college education is still a sound investment. In this paper, we review the literature on the returns to higher education in an attempt to determine who benefits from college. Despite the tremendous heterogeneity across potential college students, we conclude that the investment appears to payoff for both the average and marginal student. During the past three decades in particular, the earnings premium associated with a college education has risen substantially. Beyond the pecuniary benefits of higher education, we suggest that there also may exist non-pecuniary benefits. Given these findings, it is perhaps surprising that among recent cohorts, college completion rates have stagnated. We discuss potential explanations for this trend and conclude by succinctly interpreting the evidence on how to make the most out of college.

Be they social, economic or environmental, unprecedented challenges facing us, due to the acceleration of globalization and technological progress. At the same time, these forces offer us a wealth of new opportunities in support of human progress. The future is uncertain and unpredictable, but we must keep an open mind and we prepare. Children who enter school in 2018 will be young adults in 2030. The school can prepare them for jobs that do not yet exist, to technologies that have not yet been invented, problems that n have not yet been anticipated and they will have to overcome. It is our responsibility to all of the opportunities that arise and find solutions. What knowledge, skills, attitudes and values ​​of today's pupils will they need to succeed in life and build the world of tomorrow? How education systems can they pass that knowledge, skills, attitudes and values ​​effectively? [googletranslate_en]

Researchers acknowledge that the need to engage in problem solving and critical and creative thinking has “always been at the core of learning and innovation” (Trilling & Fadel, 2009, p. 50). What’s new in the 21st century is the call for education systems to emphasize and develop these competencies in explicit and intentional ways through deliberate changes in curriculum design and pedagogical practice. The goal of these changes is to prepare students to solve messy, complex problems – including problems we don’t yet know about – associated with living in a competitive, globally connected, and technologically intensive world.

The report is an independent review that considers legislative changes to both employment standards and labour relations to address today’s modern workplace.

Webpage- The Ontario Skills Passport (OSP) provides clear descriptions of Essential Skills and work habits important for success in work, learning and life. Learners can use the OSP tools and resources to assess, build, document and track their skills in classroom, cooperative education and other experiential learning opportunities, volunteer and extracurricular activities. This information can help them develop their Individual Pathways Plan (IPP) as they answer the questions: Who am I? What are my opportunities? Who do I want to become? What is my plan for achieving my goals?

The fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, more ubiquitously known by the acronym "STEM," have received a substantial amount of attention in recent years. As part of a research study investigating the alignment (or lack thereof) between the goals and priorities of educators and employers, we found it difficult to ascertain precisely what constituted a STEM occupation and to reconcile vastly different job, wage, and educational attainment projections. In this paper we explore the ways in which agencies and labor market researchers define STEM in six widely cited reports, and how these definitions influence the estimated and projected number of STEM jobs, estimates of how much these jobs pay, and what levels of education are necessary to attain these jobs. We find that agencies and researchers use different methods to classify STEM jobs (e.g., work tasks performed, knowledge, skills, education, type of work), which result in STEM job estimates ranging from 5.4 million to 26 million. Wage estimates exhibit a similarly wide range, from $50,000 to $96,000. In addition, jobs that require some STEM knowledge are frequently excluded from labor market analyses of STEM occupations, resulting in the under-counting of STEM-related jobs, the over-estimation of potential wages, and under-valuing of a sub-baccalaureate degree. Finally, we emphasize how groups of occupations (e.g., STEM) and industries (e.g., manufacturing) cannot be conflated with specific occupations. We recommend that researchers and agencies adopt a universal definition of STEM occupations and/or be more precise when speaking about the labor market in STEM related fields.