UNESCO’s latest UNEVOC Quarterly publication contains details about two new important initiatives likely to be of interest to Australian VET professionals.
The first is the new Skills for the Future Global Platform which is a centralised digital platform that brings together, highlights, and monitors youth skills development initiatives worldwide.
Its core function is to offer a public, interactive dashboard where organisations — including education providers, governments, non-government organisations and the private sector can learn about new “skills for the future” commitments, share data on their programs, and analyse gaps in skills development globally.
The platform comprises a few key components:
- an Initiatives Dashboard where existing youth skills programs and TVET initiatives are mapped, searchable by region, target group, and skill area
- data aggregation and visualisation tools for tracking progress toward Sustainable Development Goal 4 (Quality Education) and other UN targets, enabling gap analyses and benchmarking
- a Commitment Framework (or “common commitment structure”) that guides organisations to articulate objectives, implementation strategies, target numbers, demographic focus, partnerships, and evaluation metrics
- a Monitoring and Evaluation toolkit is also built into the platform to help participants measure the impact of their programs beyond the basic outputs, and
- the platform also includes a new Global Skills Tracker which is a complementary tool that offers analytics about the skills landscape (demand by occupation, sector, region) in selected countries (which VDC News has unpacked in the next article).
UNESCO launched the platform in response to a growing skills gap crisis: where globally millions of young people lack the skills needed for current and future job markets, and while Australia has a longstanding and well regarded VET sector which provides countless opportunities each year for our youth, there are still things we can learn from programs and practices in other countries.
In fact, the platform’s rationale is that many skills development efforts are fragmented, lack visibility, or duplicate one another; so a unified, transparent platform can foster coordination, spotlight under-served regions or themes, and accelerate collective impact.
There are details on the UNESCO-UNEVOC website if you are interested in registering your program/initiative on the platform.
