Results

Country Case Studies on Skills Strategies

Skills2Capabilities Working Paper No. 2 - April 2024

Daniel Unterweger, Jörg Markowitsch, With Case Studies By Svetlana Alexandrova, Pepka Boyadjieva, Giorgio Brunello, Clementina Crocè, Philipp Grollmann, Günter Hefler, Terence Hogarth, Petya Ilieva-Trichkova, Veneta Krasteva, Tove Mogstad Aspøy, Daniel Neff, Torgeir Nyen, Lorenzo Rocco, Eva Steinheimer.

Education and skills are central for both economic performance and societal well-being. This insight has been increasingly addressed by policy-makers on national and European level. In order to address these overarching challenges, an increasing share of countries have used strategic policy documents in the area of skills policy. However, the overall goals and orientation of different strategies and their proposed actions can vary substantially. Policy-making in industrialized economies has long focused on the benefits of acquiring skills for realizing prospective economic returns via access to well-paid jobs, but the importance of skills for a wider range of social and human/personal development aspects has in part also been taken up by policy-making. The tensions between such different orientations and approaches will be analysed as part of Work Package 2. In this first deliverable of Work Package 2 (D2.1), we provide a review of the literature, present our analytical framework for analysing skills strategies as well as our empirical approach, and present our analysis of strategic policy documents on skills at the hand of 6 country case studies, capturing the strategic document’s main foci, their comprehensiveness and the extent of their implementation.

Read the full paper here (pdf)

On the Effectiveness of School – Work Alternation Programmes in Italian High Schools

Skills2Capabilities Working Paper No. 1 - December 2023

Marco Bertoni, Giorgio Brunello, Clementina Crocè and Lorenzo Rocco; University of Padua

In 2015, school-work alternation programmes were made compulsory in all Italian high schools, with the aim of enabling students to combine theoretical learning at school with more practical experience.

A distinctive feature of this reform was that the intensity of school-workalternation varied across school tracks, being higher for professional and technical schools and lower for academic schools. In addition, the type of practical learning also varied, with students in technical and professional schools having more opportunities to learn in firms. Using a difference–in–differences approach, we show that students who participated in more hours of school-work alternation experienced a significant increase in the probability of employment during the three quarters following high school graduation.

Read the full paper here (pdf)