In the latest issue of the UNA-UK publication, Results for Development Institute authors Nicholas Burnett, Shubha Jayaram and Milan Thomas explore the skills and competencies needed to support dynamic, prosperous labour markets. Below is the original article.
The need to invest in quality education to support dynamic, prosperous labour markets is more urgent than ever. With the world’s youth unemployment standing at 12.6 per cent and projected to rise, the need to make education more relevant for employment opportunities is crucial. The advances made toward achieving Millennium Development Goal (MDG) mean that more students are transitioning to secondary school from primary education. Indeed, in all regions except sub-Saharan Africa, secondary school is now the level from which most people enter the labour market. Priority must, therefore, now be given to ensuring that jobrelevant skills and competencies are developed at that level.
Skills, competencies and economic growth
Although the terms ‘skills’ and ‘competencies’ are frequently used interchangeably, there is a subtle difference between the two. The latter is broader in scope: competencies are more than just knowledge and skills, and include the ability to apply skills in a specific context to meet complex demands. Key competencies are related to the ability of an individual to not only have access to tools and resources, but to use them in a context-appropriate manner.
Skills, on the other hand, fall into three categories: cognitive skills, non-cognitive (or ‘soft’) skills and technical skills. Cognitive skills encompass basic numeracy and literacy skills, and are referred to as ‘foundation skills’ in the 2012 Education For All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report. Non-cognitive skills (also termed as ‘behavioural’ or ‘transferable skills) are communication and leadership skills, and include entrepreneurism and reliability. The third type is technical skills, which are context or occupation-specific.
Access to high-quality education that imparts these skills and competencies is crucial for economic growth. The positive relationship between education and individual income is well established in economic literature, with studies finding an average of 10 per cent private return on individual earnings for each additional year of schooling.Of course, the quality of education is paramount, and simply sending children to school without improving the quality of educational institutions and learning is not enough.Conversely, not enrolling children in school is associated with high economic costs.Burnett et al project that if current rates of out-of-school children are not reduced, some countries will face an income gap as large as 7 per cent of GDP when today’s youth enter the workforce.
The importance of ensuring a quality, relevant education that enhances the skills of youth is clear. The current MDGs do not recognise this, but there is an attempt to do so in the current EFA Goal 3. “Ensuring that the learning needs of all young people and adults are met through equitable access to appropriate learning and life skills programmes.” Although there has never been agreement on the interpretation and measurement of this goal, some limited progress has been made, as evidenced by the focus on youth and skills in the 2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report.
The lesson of the current skills goal for any future one is the need to agree on a precise interpretation and measures of progress in advance of adopting the goal. Indeed, this also applies to some of the other current education MDGs and EFA goals, none of which had indicators defined at the time of their adoption.
There is a growing consensus that the post-2015 MDGs must somehow include both employment and learning outcomes. Both types of outcomes are reflected in the report of the Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel (published on 30 May 2013) and in its annex of illustrative future goals and targets.
One of the five “big, transformative shifts” since the previous MDGs, for example, is to “transform economies for jobs and inclusive growth”. Its illustrative Goal 3 is to “provide quality education and lifelong learning” with various targets, including to “increase the number of young and adult women and men with the skills, including technical and vocational, needed for work by x per cent” (Annex 1), along with some basic reading and learning targets at both primary and secondary level. Illustrative Goal 8 is to “create jobs, sustainable livelihoods and equitable growth” with one target to “increase the number of good and decent jobs by x”.
While these developments are very positive, they also raise concerns that, like the current set of EFA goals, they are too vague.
First, despite apparent specificity, no precise definitions of either “skills” or “good and decent jobs” are proposed. Second, there is no explicit inclusion of the informal economy, where most of the new jobs are likely to emerge in the next 10 to 15 years. Third, there is a potentially worrying emphasis on technical and vocational skills, which, as we have seen, are not necessarily as important for employment as cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Unless these three concerns are further addressed in future MDG and EFA goals, there is a major risk of being saddled with yet another set of goals that can be interpreted too flexibly, hence becoming no more than useful exhortations rather than specific goals against which progress is measured.
Promising skills development initiatives
The growing potential for concrete skills goals or targets makes it worth briefly exploring three different mechanisms that have been successfully used to initiate effective skills development programmes, specifically public-private partnerships, large-scale initiatives undertaken by the government, and comprehensive in-school programmes to boost entrepreneurial skills. An example of an innovative public-private partnership is the National Skills Development Corporation in India, established by the government in 2008 to boost the skills of about 150 million people. Meanwhile, other countries have successfully implemented reforms to improve the quality of education in partnership with external implementers.
For instance, the government of Senegal entered a partnership with Family Health International 360 and the United States Agency for International Development to launch Education de Base, a large-scale multi-stakeholder initiative to improve the quality of middle school. Reforms were made to a number of different components within the education system, including curricula and pedagogy. Industry partnerships were also developed to ensure that the material was demand-driven and relevant to the world of work. Lastly, Educate! is an example of a comprehensive entrepreneurship programme in Uganda that uses an experiential learning model with dedicated mentors to support students during the last two years of secondary school. Importantly, noncognitive, transferable skills are developed, and the entrepreneurship curriculum has now been integrated into the national framework.
These diverse examples showcase the variety of ways that policymakers and other stakeholders can work together to strengthen the skill-sets of their youth. Indeed, the most successful initiatives are collaborative and require coordinated action by government, civil society and the private sector to tighten the connection between education and the needs of the labour market.
