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Skills and Labour Markets in Germany and the UK

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Book cover Labour-Market Flexibility and Individual Careers

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Abstract

This chapter gives an insight into the skills and training systems and the relevant labour-market principles in Germany and the UK. Understanding how the labour market and training systems are structured at the national level is important because interviewees’ work orientations and individual careers are contextually embedded in these two systems. Since they have undergone their vocational socialization and training in one of the national contexts, their work biographies are oriented towards the particular system and reflect it. Concurrently, the respective labour-market rationale sets the structural framework against which employees are making decisions: it creates restrictions and opportunities, which largely determine the scope of an individual’s possible responses.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The adequacy of such clear-cut differentiation is not uncontested. The diversity of training schemes in Britain, for example, gives rise to conflicting views about the UK’s labour market. Recent developments of a new vocationalism in Britain, for example, may suggest a more complex differentiation.

  2. 2.

    In 2006, 16% of apprentices overall (with peak figures of over 50 in the financial and taxation sector) possessed qualifications which guaranteed them HE entry (BMBF, 2008).

  3. 3.

    SVQ and GSVQ for Scotland, respectively.

  4. 4.

    The major objectives of the Copenhagen Declaration are to enhance European cooperation in vocational education and training (VET) by supporting a single framework for transparency of qualifications and competences facilitated through a European Qualification Framework and a credit transfer system for VET: a system that enables individuals to progressively obtain credit points based on the competences they acquire along their vocational learning route, in both formal and informal settings. Embedded in a framework of lifelong learning, the European member states should furthermore agree on common principles for validation of non-formal and informal learning (Hanf, 2005).

  5. 5.

    For a review and discussion of the variety of concepts and approaches of competence in psychology and educational sciences see, for example, Arnold (1997), Jenewein, Knauth, Röben & Zülich (2004), Pietrzyk (2002), and Röben (2005).

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  1. University of Bremen, Centre for Social Policy Research, UNICOM-Gebäude, Mary-Somerville-Str. 5, 28359, Bremen, Germany

    Dr. Simone R. Kirpal

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Correspondence to Simone R. Kirpal .

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Kirpal, S.R. (2011). Skills and Labour Markets in Germany and the UK. In: Labour-Market Flexibility and Individual Careers. Technical and Vocational Education and Training: Issues, Concerns and Prospects, vol 13. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0234-9_2

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