Comparing Labour Market Expectations and VET qualifications in the NecVET European Project

This paper presents the results of a research in the field of Vocational Education and Training (VET) undertaken the framework of the EU project named "New approaches to strengthened cooperation facilities for VET institutions and labour market" (NecVet). The NecVET project has the aim of setting up a network between vocational education institutions and enterprises to explore the effectiveness of training programmes for VET students. Moreover, the expectations of labour market has been compared with the learning programmes provided by the vocational education institutions through a questionnaire composed by two sections. The first section collects information about the opinions of representatives of the labour market about competencies and skills of enterprise employees as well as the level of communication between educational institutions and labour market. The second section collects information about skills and personal capabilities needed in specific enterprise sectors. The questionnaire has been delivered to a sample of 500 interviewers composed by 10 labour market representatives in 10 different sectors (Health, Electronics and electricity, ICT, Textile, Mechanics, Construction, Agriculture, Tourism, Business and administration, Cosmetics) and in 5 European countries (Turkey, Italy, Spain, Greece, Poland). The years of experience in the specific sector of the representatives has been also considered in the evaluation of questionnaires. The significance differences between the opinion of the entrepreneurs for countries and sectors are presented in this paper. In particular, the results highlight the needs to improve the training programmes in order to improve the qualification and competitiveness of students in the labour market.