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2017 Chinese Taipei HRDWG-EDNET Project

Background

This project primarily seeks to address the youth unemployment problem that is being encountered in many parts of the APEC region, due to the disparity between what is learned at school and what is required by industry (education gap) and between the skills that jobseekers possess and the skills wanted by companies (skills gap). According to the World Bank, in 2014, the rate of youth unemployment has risen to 14%, exclusive of Hong Kong and Chinese Taipei. In Chinese Taipei, the figure has risen to 12.05% in 2015.

In responding to the call to “enhance collaboration and exchange in education services” and to resolve the aforementioned issues that have resulted from education gap and skills gap, Chinese Taipei wishes to share the collaboration models that have been strategically designed and implemented at technological universities wherein students are recruited into vocational programs that are tailor-made to train them with skills matching the needs of the industrial sector. These young recruits receive certificates, in addition to their degrees when they graduate, and more importantly, are trained in accordance to the types of technical skills that are needed in the marketplace. At the same time, participating delegates from other economies will also be invited to share policies and practices enacted by their respective authorities to counter this problem.

Current Project

The current project, Skills Training in Industry-Academia Collaboration in CTE: Best practices and implementation in the engineering, hospitality and innovative entrepreneurship fields, is a follow-up project to the one completed in 2015, when APEC member economies were invited to come and discuss collaboration models in the fields of engineering, health care, and hospitality and tourism. By 2017, the first couple of Chinese Taipei student cohorts will have already graduated and been employed by partner companies, so delegates from APEC economies may compare the fruits of such collaborations through interaction with the industry and the students themselves. This workshop will be an opportunity for participating economies to discuss the effects of such partnerships and other models in vocational education which can be applied to CTE in each economy.

Some of the key objectives of the current project are as follows:

To promote and share best practices in terms of designing vocational training models tailor-made to cultivate manpower with skills that match the needs of the industrial sector
To establish an exchange network for experience sharing and information dissemination of education programs, where member economies can together face and solve the challenges posed by education and skills gap
In the long run, to narrow the existing skills gap and further to achieve inclusive growth and sustainable development within the APEC region