School of Education Nottingham UNEVOC Centre

Current priority: The TVET-industry gap

The UNEVOC centre at the School of Education, University of Nottingham is developing a range of projects focused on exploring the gap between TVET and employers in various settings. What sets TVET apart from all other forms of education is TVET’s direct relationship with work.

UNESCO-UNEVOC has long been a leading voice on the need to foster partnerships between TVET institutions and industry/workplaces, particularly in response to the global challenge of youth unemployment, and reports such as the International Commission on the Futures of Education (2021) and the TVET-work related aspects of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

However, TVET colleges consistently face challenges in connecting to and partnering with local industry, whether in the form of work-based learning for students, professional development for TVET lecturers, curriculum reform or employment opportunities for TVET graduates, often because TVET is under-funded and in many contexts much ‘work’ resides in the informal sector.

What we refer to as the TVET-industry gap, is a challenge internationally regardless of whether the focus is on TVET in developed or developing country settings. Our current focus is in collaborating with partners in various geographic TVET settings to develop empirical and theoretical understandings of the TVET-industry gap from an education perspective.  As part of our commitment to the UNEVOC network this work will be linked to a seminar series, a special issue of a journal and collaborations with institutions regionally and internationally. Several postgraduate students and post-doctoral fellows are linked to this work through our internal UNEVOC network.