To engage or not to engage : what can the national VET system offer enterprises?

One of the challenges facing industry in Australia is finding the best way to harness the opportunities offered by the national vocational education and training (VET) system. The VET system with its network of registered training organisations, and infrastructure of Training Packages and the VET Quality Framework, has the potential to assist organisations to develop approaches to training that are truly national in scope and focus. However there are significant barriers to realising this goal. This chapter outlines the architecture of the VET system, and then analyses the issues and challenges that industry faces in its efforts to work with the national training system, and the strategies and practices industry uses in addressing them to meet workforce development needs

Gatekeepers in Regional Networks of Innovators

The internal density of a local network is said to increase the regionspecific knowledge-stock and might lead to a comparative advantage. However, it might also lead to a lock-in situation, if local trajectories are directed towards inferior solutions. Accordingly it is argued that successful clusters are characterised by the existence of gatekeepers, i.e. actors that generate novelty by drawing on local and external knowledge. We attempt to answer questions related to the role and characteristics of gatekeepers within regional innovation systems by applying social network analysis based on patent data for four East-German regions. The regional networks appear to be significantly different with respect to the overall degree of interaction and with respect to their relative outward orientation. Concerning the characteristics of gatekeepers, we find that size does not play the major role for being a gatekeeper. It is rather absorptive capacity that matters for gatekeepers. It also shows that public research organisations serve the functions of a gatekeeper to a higher degree than private actors