This article explores cross-country patterns in how conditions relating to family background, education, and the labor market are related to literacy and numeracy skills. It seeks to assess whether these patterns are in agreement with models of skills formation as identified in the political economy literature. The novelty of this article resides…

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused one of the worst economic crises since the Great Depression. Although countries responded quickly to support displaced workers with assistance packages and funding for education and training, additional measures might be needed. Each country's economic recovery will most likely depend on how well its workforce is…

This report projects Northern Ireland's skills base through to 2030 and compares this to a number of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. The report shows that on current trends Northern Ireland will continue to lag many other countries on a number of measures of learning and skills in 2030. These shortfalls can…

"Public-Private Partnerships for Skills Development" discusses the concept of public-private partnership (PPP) and its application in the domain of skills development. Volume I proposes a three-dimension typology of PPPs for skills development, and identifies common elements and governance characteristics of these PPPs. Volume II…

To ensure that young people and adults acquire the skills they need to render them employable, vocational education and training systems around the world construct various forms of collaboration between the public and private sectors. Public-private partnerships that focus on skills development are one form of collaboration in the provision of…

Poor literacy skills can result in exclusion and reduce people's capacity to participate in political, social, cultural and economic life. This is important for migrants, refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) who seek to live and work in a dignified, safe and fair environment and to be engaged members of their new communities. The…

Lifelong learning is becoming increasingly important in today's societies. Individuals need to develop their skills through training in order to be successfully integrated in the labor market. We use data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies to investigate gender differences in training across 12 countries. We…

The combination of work and study has been hailed as crucial to ensure that youth develop the skills required on the labour market so that transitions from school to work are shorter and smoother. This paper fills an important gap in availability of internationally-comparable data. Using the 2012 Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), it draws a…

This study benchmarks marketing doctoral programs worldwide in five popular subareas by faculty and institutional scholarly impact. A multi-item approach identifies a collection of top-tier scholarly journals for each subarea, while citation data over the decade 2003 to 2012 identify high scholarly impact marketing faculty by subarea used to…

This paper looks at the importance of mechanisms that give formal recognition to vocational skills acquired through work-based learning and how such mechanisms might be developed. It describes how skill recognition can benefit individuals, employers and society as a whole, and identifies in which contexts skill recognition has the highest…

In this paper, I argue for more and better learning metrics in higher education, eventually through an international, comparative assessment of students' learning outcomes. Better learning measures may help to improve transparency in the system by addressing the information asymmetry problem. If not addressed adequately, the lack of transparency…

The European workplace is challenging VET adults' problem-solving skills in technology-rich environments (TREs). So far, no international large-scale assessment data has been available for VET. The PIAAC data comprise the most comprehensive source of information on adults' skills to date. The present study (N = 50 369) focuses on gaining insight…

The European workplace is challenging VET adults' problem-solving skills in technology-rich environments (TREs). So far, no international large-scale assessment data has been available for VET. The PIAAC data comprise the most comprehensive source of information on adults' skills to date. The present study (N = 50 369) focuses on gaining insight…

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the link between age and proficiency in information-processing skills, based on information drawn from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). The data reveal significant age-related differences in proficiencies, strongly suggesting that proficiency tends to "naturally" decline with age. Age…

This first "OECD Skills Outlook" presents the initial results of the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), which evaluates the skills of adults in 22 OECD member countries and two partner countries. The PIAAC survey was designed to provide insights into the availability of some key skills and how they are used at work and at home through the…