Comparative Advantages of School and Workplace Environment in Competence Acquisition: Empirical Evidence From a Survey Among Professional Tertiary Education and Training Students in Switzerland

This paper sheds light on the questions how important competences are and which competences can best be learned at school and which competences can be acquired better in the workplace. Exploiting data from a survey among professional tertiary education and training business administration students and their employers in Switzerland, we find that competences related to strategic management, human resource management, organizational design and project management processes are most suitable to be taught in school. However, the results further suggest that soft skills can be acquired more effectively in the workplace than at school. The only exceptions are analytical thinking, joy of learning and organizational competences, for which school and workplace are similarly suitable. Thereby, the paper provides empirical evidence regarding the optimal choice of the learning place for both human resource managers as well as educational decision makers who aim to combine education and training, e.g. in an apprenticeship

How to train the deliberate use of intuition

We aim to investigate how to professionally train our skill at using intuition deliberately because prior research has shown that intuition has the potential to outperform the analytical mind, especially in complex and uncertain situations that will become only more frequent in the years to come. Teaching people to learn how to use intuition can be particularly decisive because it represents a crucial soft skill for the next generation of critical and creative thinkers. By applying advanced bibliometric analysis techniques in this mapping study, we systematically explore and visualize intuition research to highlight potential methods to train the skill of deliberately using intuition in the classroom. Our Web of Science data set comprises 7,680 peer reviewed documents with 253,986 references published by 166,649 authors through the end of 2021. Despite these high numbers, intuition is an underexplored scientific field characterized by methodological challenges, some of which are due to its unconscious nature. Our study offers first insights into research that can enhance the use of intuition. Our main goal is inspiring future research to help reveal intuition’s unexploited educational potential, which can then stimulate new teaching initiatives.ISSN:2624-7984ISSN:2624-799

Does ICT affect the demand for vocationally educated workers?

This paper examines the efect of information and communication technologies (ICT) on the demand for workers in Switzerland. We compare the hypotheses that an increase in ICT leads to upskilling or job polarization and investigate their implications for countries where vocational education and training (VET) is the most widespread education program at the upper secondary level. Using data from a large employer–employee survey, we create a novel measure of ICT based on the percentage of ICT workers within frms. This measure allows us to assess the impact of ICT on the educational composition of the workforce by exploiting variation over time. We fnd that ICT has an upskilling efect from 1996 to 2018: ICT decreases the demand for low-skilled workers while increasing the demand for high-skilled workers, especially those with a tertiary vocational education. These results strongly suggest that VET is a valid alternative to a strictly academic education, because workers with a tertiary VET degree are as good, or better, at adjusting to technological change as workers with a tertiary academic education.ISSN:0303-9692ISSN:2235-628

Does ICT Affect the Demand for Vocationally Educated Workers in Switzerland?

This paper examines the effect of information and communication technologies (ICT) on the demand for workers in Switzerland. We compare the hypotheses that an increase in ICT leads to either upskilling or job polarization, and investigate their implications for countries with a diffuse vocational education and training (VET) system. Using data from a large employer-employee survey, we create a novel measure of ICT based on the percentage of ICT workers within firms. This measure allows us to assess the impact of ICT on the educational composition of the workforce by exploiting variation over time. We find that ICT has an upskilling effect from 1996 to 2018: ICT decreases the demand for low-skilled workers while increasing the demand for high-skilled workers, especially those with a tertiary vocational education. These results strongly suggest that VET is a valid alternative to a strictly academic education, because workers with a tertiary VET degree are as good at adjusting to technological change—and sometimes even superior to—workers with a tertiary academic education

The Linkage Between the Education and Employment Systems: Ideal Types of Vocational Education and Training Programs

In this article, we argue that every typology should be constructed in a systematic, transparent process. Moreover, to validate a typology’s explanatory value, a typological approach must rest on a strong theoretical foundation. We both propose such an approach and apply it to construct three ideal types of vocational education and training (VET) programs. We build on Luhmann’s theory of social systems, which helps elucidate the significance of the linkage between actors from the education and employment systems in VET. The first ideal type, with a maximal linkage, entails equal power-sharing between actors from the two systems. We expect such a VET program to have the most favorable youth labor market outcome. In contrast, the other two ideal types, in which only one system has all of the power, result in either undesirable outcomes, such as unemployment or skill mismatch, or missing access to further education