A successful marriage of education, labour needs
Jul 20, 2010
Aussies match higher education courses to workforce demands
About 200,000 Thais graduate each year with bachelor degrees, but not
all can find jobs. The rising number of unemployed graduates stems from
a disturbing mismatch of university education and labour market
requirements.
For a better balance, Thailand may need a
national agenda. This is what Scott Evans, an education counsellor at
the Australian Embassy in Bangkok, told an audience last week at the
United Nations Conference on Creative Education for Sustainable
Achievements: New Ways to Learn.
Evans said globalisation had
not only brought changes to Australia, but to most countries across the
world, including Thailand. So, it may be time for Thailand to adapt to
such changes by enhancing its human capital and labour productivity,
and try to move the country forward in a world that is "getting
smaller".
Australia established a national Department of
Education, Employment and Workplace Relations in 2007 to help its
education and employment officials work together, by getting to know
each side's needs.
"With education and employment policymakers
in the same department and the same building and with same direct
management structure, we are forced to take notice of the intersection
between education policy and workforce policy. The education department
- it cannot develop separate education policy and market needs," Evans
said.
Combining the two groups had been successful, he said,
as they could match policy to develop the supply and the demand sides
in terms of education and the reality of Australian work market.
The policy synergies were much better and the mix between employment and education was now much stronger.
Scott
said Australia had implemented a national productivity agenda as well,
with collaboration from Federal, state and territory governments.
With
higher education levels tied to higher earnings and lower rates of
unemployment, he said the agenda focused on investing in skills and the
participation of students and workers across the life cycle.
Australia
has initiated a national curriculum for every state and territory
government to apply. But the curriculum is flexible and allows each
local government to include other useful or creative courses for
students.
So far, it has invested A$16 billion (Bt448.28 billion) to provide better educational infrastructure.
Australia
has estimated that best practice investment in early childhood could
generate an average increase of 0.6 per cent to baseline GDP and 1.1
per cent in employment every year to 2040.
And increasing the
proportion of population with postschool qualifications could generate
an average increase of 2.9 per cent to baseline GDP and 1.4 per cent in
employment every year up to 2040.
Meanwhile, with the goal to be
competitive in industry and technology internationally, Japan at first
focused on strengthening basic education.
For Prof Tatsuji
Seki, from Osaka University's Bangkok Centre for Education and
Research, good basic knowledge makes it is easier to develop
highquality workers, who can help develop technology and industry,
whereas universities can focus on research.
"Now, Japanese cars
are found all over the world. About 120 years ago our country opened to
the world. So, when we opened our country, what kind of education did
we need at that time?" he said
"We thought we should include
basic knowledge at the first, so we can have many highquality
technicians at the beginning, and after that we can make the cars,
radios and cameras."
After the World War II, he said the government put an emphasis on keeping educational standards high.
Students
had equal opportunity to access quality education. Some test results
showed that 44 students from Japan's 44 prefectures had almost the same
quality of education.
The majority of students had very good acquired knowledge necessary for each grade, compared with other countries.
The
UN conference was part of several that took place under the theme
"MegaTrends in Human Capital and Labour Productivity towards Global
Integration".
Hosted by the Labour Ministry's Department of
Skills Development, the Thailand Productivity Institute, Industry
Ministry and Federation of Thai Industries, the event aimed to build
policy framework on a strategic national plan for human capital and
labour productivity based on output from the conference.
For
Thailand, productivity in the industrial, agricultural and service
sectors must be increased, along with a balance of workforce and labour
market demands.
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