Learning and skills contribute to economic growth both directly, by improving the skills base available to employers, and indirectly, by underpinning the five foundations of productivity identified by the government: ideas, people, infrastructure, business environment, and places. This is the case for all levels of learning from basic skills to…

The rapidly changing picture on localism and the government's focus on local economic growth have significant implications for adult learning and skills providers in England. Government now sees a sense of place as key to economic growth and recognises the need for a renewed debate on how business and state interact with localities. There is a…

This study was guided by the desire to advance whether concerted effort could enhance the creativity and innovations of women towards empowerment. Other purposes include: establishing the level of empowerment towards attaining good growth in building the informal sector economy and enhancing the status of women in Oke Ogun zone of Nigeria;…

The article analyses the discourses underpinning formal vocational education and training (VET). More specifically, it presents three accounts of European VET with the twofold aim of reviewing them and of recommending a conceptual shift that leads to further theoretical discussion. The discussion is organised around the existence of three…

"Ambition 2020: World Class Skills and Jobs" is the UK Commission for Employment and Skills' annual assessment, to the four UK nations, of their progress towards becoming "world class" in productivity, employment and skills by 2020. "Ambition 2020" provides a robust independent account of economic and skills…

Why should individuals care about innovation? One reason is because it can help to make life better. More specifically, governments, enterprises and training institutions see innovation as having the potential to increase productivity and, down the track, to increase prosperity for Australia. As far back as 1934, the influential economist Joseph…

Recognising both the complexity of skills policies and the potential for peer learning, the OECD has developed a global Skills Strategy that helps countries to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their national skills systems, benchmark them internationally, and develop policies that can transform better skills into better jobs, economic…

On 11 November the Government published its third skills strategy for England in six years (quite apart from Lord Leitch's "Review of Skills" commissioned by the Treasury). Entitled "Skills for Growth: the national skills strategy," this White Paper, together with a separate analytical paper and a "Skills Investment…

Against a backdrop of some two decades of sustained economic growth in Ghana, this paper argues that there are a series of sustainability challenges related to technical and vocational skills development (TVSD) that need to be addressed. This paper analyses several sustainability dimensions of TVSD related to: promoting the sustainability of…

In the context of aging populations, governments in Australia and in other Western nations fear that slower growth in the numbers of people of working age (15-64 years) will have a dampening effect on economic growth. They are thus considering how to encourage older workers to remain in the workforce beyond the point at which many currently…

In developing countries, skills development has been neglected. Skills development does not appear in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) or in many poverty reduction strategies and has been side-lined in favour of investment in primary education. However, it is hoped that discussion of skills development in the 2005 Global Monitoring Report…

The ingredients that underpin economic growth are well-known and generally accepted; population growth, physical capital, financial capital and human capital all play a part in creating long term differences in the wealth of nations. There remains, however, considerable debate about the ideal recipe for economic growth. Recently, Statistics Canada…

This article considers the prevalence of what have been termed "training discourses" as dominant practices within a particular University of Technology, and discusses the implications of such discourses for teaching and learning. The rapid emergence of this training or skills discourse in Universities of Technology in South Africa, in…

This article investigates the contribution skills development can make in promoting South Africa's wider socio-economic development. It provides a broad overview of the emerging gap between those who are benefiting from South Africa's transition to democracy and those who are not. Overcoming these worsening social conditions has become a major…