A focus on skills increasingly links higher education with employment

By Yojana Sharma. The attention of education policy-makers and the international education community is moving away from raising literacy levels and increasing access to secondary and higher education, towards skills required by the workforce to promote economic growth.
This became increasingly evident during the past year in the richest countries. Recognition of the issue is also growing in emerging economies and middle-income countries, and is likely to be a major debate in developing nations as discussion on what should succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) takes centre stage in the next two years. Higher education experts say that universities are coming under increasing pressure to ensure that their graduates are ‘employable’, although preparation for ‘employability’ is still only rarely incorporated in university courses, and the skills that could make a difference in finding employment and ways to deliver those skills are still not evident.
“There is growing awareness of the need to link education to employment,” said Nicholas Burnett, managing director of the Results for Development Institute in Washington, DC, and a former assistant director general for education at UNESCO where he was head of the Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report.Read more...