TVET closures and the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic risk exacerbating inequalities and causing a “lockdown generation”. Inclusive skills development and lifelong learning opportunities are vital to prevent people from being left behind, to maintain people’s employability, and to ensure that economies and enterprises recover promptly from the crisis.
This ILO guide on making TVET and skills development inclusive for all targets policymakers and representatives of workers’ and employers’ organizations engaged in skills development systems, TVET centre staff, and development practitioners providing skills policy advice. The guide aims to help skills decisionmakers and practitioners assess to what extent their TVET system is currently excluding certain individuals or groups, identifies underlying reasons, and provides practical ideas on what could be done to redress inequalities. The guide’s self-assessment tool is also available in digital format.
Improving the labour market prospects and quality of work for those disadvantaged in the labour market is a key focus of the ILO’s research and capacity building agenda. Inclusion is not just a normative goal, it also benefits employers who gain a broader pool of available skills, co-workers who learn from more diverse environments, and governments and societies who would otherwise shoulder the costs of exclusion.
This guide has been authored by Ralf Lange, Christine Hofmann and Manuela Di Cara. It incorporates comments from Jürgen Menze, Gurchaten Sandhu, Laura SchmidMaaret Canedo Lohikoski, Maria Teresa Gutierrez, Ashwani Aggarwal, and Rafael Peels. The self-assessment tool was piloted during an ITC/ILO E-learning course on Skills for Social Inclusion. Janet Neubecker and the ITC-ILO
