WorldSkills vision 2025: strategic plan

Since its inception in 1950, WorldSkills has built an impressive presence on the world stage of vocational education and training, demonstrating global excellence in skills through its biennial international skills competitions and promoting the importance of a strong skills system for every country or region. The 21st century has seen an exceptional growth in the membership, capability, profile, and reach of WorldSkills, as Member numbers have grown to 76, including all of the G20 countries, and the scale of the biennial competitions has grown dramatically. The rapid growth has raised the profile of WorldSkills, but also highlighted the need for WorldSkills Members to work together more closely towards shared standards of excellence for every Member. In the same period, global political and development agencies have increasingly recognized the fundamental centrality to economic development and growth for all countries of having a strong national vocational education and training (VET) system.

This places an increasing obligation on the Members of WorldSkills to work together to raise skills standards in both new and candidate countries and regions if the long-term ambitions of WorldSkills are to be met. Together with our Global Partners, WorldSkills should be leading a drive to raise skills standards around the world, to help create greater equality of economic opportunity for all countries and regions, organizations, and individuals. The significant growth in membership over the last ten years has highlighted major differences in standards in different national VET systems, and is leading to major variations in Competitor performance between Members. Though Members come with different backgrounds, experiences, and expectations, their principal motivation in joining the WorldSkills movement is to improve the quality of their national VET systems through the competition framework and the experience of other Members. WorldSkills can no longer be satisfied with just organizing international competitions to demonstrate excellence in skills. We must become the leading organization driving up the skills of the world - using the WorldSkills Competitions to help showcase excellence, demonstrate the power of the WorldSkills standards, and continually raising global benchmarks as our spearhead of international efforts to both help WorldSkills members improve their standards and to improve skills levels and opportunities for young people and their countries and regions globally.

WorldSkills has identified three broad strategic goals for its work in this Strategic Plan to 2025, specifically to: (1) Raise ambition and opportunity in VET for young people, employers, and societies; (2) Enhance the quality of VET provision through stronger connections to labour markets, employers, and economies; and (3) Help build the organizational capability of WorldSkills and the global competitiveness of its Members through skills.

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