Education and Training for the Modern Labour Market
johnquigginblog.substack.com
Education and Training for the Modern Labour Market
Paper presented to Jobs and Skills Australia, 24 October 2024
I was asked to give a lunchtime talk to economists from Jobs and Skills Australia, and decided to talk about the problems of education and training and, in particular, what I see as the failure of the apprenticeship model for vocational training. It’s not an area in which I’m a real expert, but it was well-received and provoked plenty of discussion. Here’s a link to the presentation and here are a couple of slides that present some of the argument
Open for comments and discussion now
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We talk about continual learning in most professions. In my field, software, any support for this is up to employers, so is voluntary and ad-hoc and inadequate.
Likewise, there is no support for programmers attaining job experience before embarking on >= 4 years of full time education (although many do), thus much learning is delivered to students who completely lack context and motivation for the lesson.
I would love to live in a world where the default path into software engineering mixed both work experience and formal education, over a long period of time. I suspect the same model could work for many professions.
Some years ago as he was in election mode, I button holed Chris Bowen to explain that Jesus had been an apprentice carpenter to Joseph. He was hardly the first in this ancient system. It's often family based and in other circumstances apprentices are first to go when the business strikes any difficulty. Adam Smith railed against the system as grossly exploitative. Yet here we are. Chris Bowen begged to differ saying he liked the system. Well I tried. Hopefully you'll have better luck.