Initial vocational training (VT) in high school consists of short-term programs leading to employment in a skilled trade. To better align training with employment opportunities and to encourage students to stay in the programs until they graduate, most programs include traineeship. Since traineeships involve acquiring skills directly on the job,…

An ongoing debate is centred around the question of how we can understand the value of university credentials in accessing jobs. We know that occupations are strong determinants of which skills, knowledge and abilities are utilised in work but we do not know enough of how occupational contexts shape what university degrees represent to employers…

Over the past century, the United States workforce has undergone a massive structural shift. Technological change has moved the economy toward skilled labor and away from unskilled labor--a phenomenon known as skill-biased technical change. This structural shift has increased the relative demand for educated and skilled labor, leading to…

This appendix documents the methodology used by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce to project educational demand within the US economy. The methodology produces forecasts using data from two private analytics companies. The authors use occupational forecasts provided by Lightcast that are calibrated to total employment…

The staggering highs and lows of the recent US economy and their effect on the labor force has been deeply unsettling. The US has come through the COVID-19 recession, the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, followed by the quickest recovery ever. One trend in the workforce has remained unaltered throughout this historic change:…

This report projects education requirements linked to forecasted job growth for all 50 states and the District of Columbia from 2021 through 2031. It complements a larger national report that projects education demand by occupation and industry for the same period. The national report finds that by 2031, 72 percent of all jobs nationally will…

In the post-World War II period, workers with a high school diploma or less were able to attain jobs with middle-class wages in American industry. Good jobs were available in manufacturing and other blue-collar industries that employed large numbers of high school-educated workers. But as automation, globalization, and related phenomena have led…

Since 2011, the government of British Columbia (BC) has focused on building the Canadian province's economy through the development of a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) sector. In service of this endeavour, the government launched the "Skills for Jobs Blueprint," which attempts to more clearly align BC's education system with resource…

Washington employment projections continue to show strong demand for workers with postsecondary education. Nearly 70 percent of all projected job openings require at least some education beyond high school, with two-thirds requiring midlevel education or higher. As businesses, industries, and workplaces become increasingly complex, employers need…

There is a growing body of research interrogating the discursive construction of "rural" in negative terms--as lacking, in decline or in crisis. This paper contributes to this body of literature by taking as its point of departure skilled trades training in Canada's most easterly province, Newfoundland and Labrador. To meet the labour…

This careers strategy is part of the plan to make Britain fairer, improve social mobility and offer opportunity to everyone. The ambitious, modern Industrial Strategy sets out a long-term plan to boost national productivity and the earning power of people throughout the country. Britain wants every person, no matter what their background is, to be…

This study of job advertisements extends our understanding of how employers, rather than researchers, describe the specific skills and attributes sought in candidates for employment in graduate marketing roles in Australia. The article presents the findings of a content analysis of 359 marketing job advertisements downloaded in 2016, in two…

Human capital investment is a necessary condition for improving labour market outcomes in most countries. Empirical studies to investigate human capital and its linkages on the labour demand side are, however, relatively scarce due to limitations of firm-level data-sets. Using firm-level data from the Thai manufacturing sector, this paper aims to…

Most of the social and economic policies in the U.S. do not explicitly address or take into account the growing importance of families as sources of human capital and determinants of individual success. Even the small subsets of programs that we conventionally frame as part of "family policy" are often based on long-defunct assumptions…

The author explores the prospect of improving pathways and opportunities for tradespeople in Australia through the introduction of a masters-level qualification. The study investigates the views and opinions of senior industry representatives and professional educators to determine whether the introduction of a master trade or master artisan…