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This report is based on eight country case studies and seeks to inform policymakers and practitioners in the Arab States, including private sector and civil society about how to design and manage effective work-based learning (WBL) programmes targeting young people. In addition, this report seeks to provide current information on the state of WBL in the region by examining the national contexts, nature and extent of WBL, policies and legislations, employer and employee organizations, resources to improve the quality of WBL programs, funding, and data on performance of WBL on employment, productivity, growth, and sustainable development. The report also examines WBL as a vector for access to TVET for disadvantaged groups including young women.

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Over the last 20 years, the voice of business and its impact upon Australian vocational education have transformed. These changes comprise the reluctance of enterprise to be involved; industry determining what is taught and assessed, and how; the principles for administering vocational education; and attempts to use vocational education to reform the schooling system. These transformations and government complicity in them are enmeshed in the restructuring of the Australian economy, allegedly in response to an increasingly competitive and globalised economy. They were also facilitated by vocational education continuing to be misunderstood and having low status. However, the expanded leadership role afforded to Australian business has not been matched by its purchase on the complexity of educational issues and practice, including the need to encompass other interests (e.g. small business and students). While vocational education has become the business of business, it seems it is business not understood. Even in addressing its own purposes (i.e. work readiness), business has demonstrated a preference for ideological and naive imperatives that have proved inadequate. Along the way, the goals for vocational education and standing of its institutions, practitioners and students have all been transformed, probably to their detriment.

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Workers, world-wide, increasingly need to engage in continuing education and training to respond to changing workplace requirements, maintain and increase productivity, remain workplace competent (employable), and participate in longer work lives. Australian workers are no exception here. Yet, given that most of the current Australian tertiary education and training provisions largely focus on initial occupational preparation (i.e. entry-level training), these provisions may not adequately meet the kinds of learning needs of existing workers who need to build upon their initial occupational education and training, or transfer what they know to a new occupation. Therefore, the current focus may need broadening or transformation to better meet the learning needs of Australian workers who face continual change in the requirements for performance in their lengthening working lives. A team of researchers from Griffith University is conducting a three year project, funded by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER), to review and appraise current provisions of tertiary education and training and to identify models of tertiary education and training provisions and related pedagogic practices that will be effective in responding to the growing educational project that comprises continuing education and training. This paper reports how some worker-learners from the aged care industry prefer these provisions to be organised for their work and workplaces. The tentative findings advanced here indicate a high preference for everyday learning through work individually, and assisted by other experienced workers and mentors or supervisors in the workplace. These early findings point to demands for a larger component of courses offered by tertiary education and training providers to be delivered at the work site, and for increased levels of on-site support for learning. The findings have implications for changes to policies and provisions for models of continuing education and training. Show less

This paper draws on the findings of three studies of workplace learning conducted in Queensland in order to examine both the potential and limits of the informal learning processes by which skilful vocational knowledge is transmitted in workplace learning arrangements such as apprenticeships. The studies emphasise the importance of the social and cultural context of such skills learning. Show less

This paper discusses progress in a two-year study of the work, working lives and learning of twelve workers. They comprise four groups of three workers in an emergency service, a gymnasium, a restaurant and IT help desk. The concept of relational interdependence between individual and social agency (Billett 2005), is used to understand their participation, learning and remaking of cultural practices. These are held to be products of the interdependence between social suggestion and individual agency and are enacted at the intersection between the social and cognitive experience comprising the engagement in work. In seeking to elaborate the bases of these interdependencies and their consequences for changes to individuals’ cognitive experience and sense of self, and the remaking of cultural practices, four partially linked and overlapping bases for understanding the processes of interdependencies emerge. These are: (i) reflection and review (i.e. reflection); (ii) performance roles (kinds of selves developed in the workplace); (iii) prospects for dialogue (i.e. opportunities for interpersonal interactions); and (iv) how conceptions of rewards and recognition are constructed. In different but distinct ways these four bases provide a means to elaborate interdependencies at work, thereby providing a platform to analyse processes of individual learning and the remaking of work practices and concepts.

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Interviews with workers and managers show differences in preferred models of training, depending on the purpose of the training. When the purpose is to remain current and employable, to advance careers or to bring about workplace change, then workplace and practice-based models are the most valued. However, when the purpose is to secure employment or change jobs then educational institution-based models are more favoured. This is the second report coming out of a three-year program of research which aims to investigate how the tertiary education and training system might best be organised to maintain the employability of workers across their working lives.

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This paper reports the findings of a study undertaken in Queensland to determine ways of judging the costs and benefits of training, and to discover how firms could make a return on their investment in training. The study failed to reveal any firm correlation between expenditure on training and direct returns. Show less

This report is an analysis of current and recent research concerning returns to enterprises from investment in vocational education and training (VET). There is a summary of recent and current research and a discussion of the research and analysis methodology. The body of the report looks at how the reviewed research has contributed to knowledge around the topic, and identifies areas which have been well or adequately researched, areas which have been researched but where more or better research is needed, and areas where no research has yet been done. Show less

Identifying and understanding workplace pedagogic practices is central to finding ways to develop individuals' vocational practice throughout their working lives. Key to these concerns are workplace participatory factors which illuminate relations between the workplace and individual. This paper proposes how these practices manifested themselves in different ways across and within a workplace and identifies their consequences for individuals' learning. The particular workplace was the subject of a year-long study of guided learning in workplace settings. The paper illustrates how localised factors shape workplace pedagogic and participatory practices, through the activities, guidance and support they afforded to workers which influence their learning through work. These findings contribute to and elaborate a pedagogy for the workplace.

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Volume one of these proceedings is indexed at TD/TNC 68.31, volume two is indexed at TD/TNC 68.32 and individual papers may be found from TD/TNC 68.17 to TD/TNC 68.29 and TD/TNC 68.33 to TD/TNC 68.100. Show less

The need for vocational education to respond to demand-side factors has become a key policy goal for vocational education in Australia. However, what comprises the demand side has not been critically appraised. Assumptions that only industry and enterprises comprise the demand side are questioned by the legitimate claims for inclusion by regions and individuals. Taking this more inclusive definition of the demand side of vocational education, the outcomes of a study that investigated the changing relationship between industry and enterprises are reported. It also mapped the needs of the four client groups. Identified are both commonality and difference in these needs, some of which are not readily reconcilable within an enterprise or industry-led vocational education system. Means for reconciling the needs of the client groups within curriculum development are discussed, as are some supply-side considerations.

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