A report on Romania’s education system reveals a gap between vocational training provision and the needs of the labour market. There are currently around 80,000 fewer vocational and technical students than the labour market needs, while in schools for technical managers there are more than four times as many students as are likely to find jobs. The authors of the National Trade Union Bloc report conclude that there is a lack of communication between companies and schools.
Background
The Catalysts for Vocational Training project was initiated in Romania by the National Trade Union Bloc (BNS), the country’s second largest union federation. It was carried out in partnership with trade unions, consultancy and training providers from Germany and Portugal, and co-financed by the European Social Fund (ESF) through its Sectoral Operational Programme on human resources development. The general aim of the project was to create a trans national initiative for the development of human resources and an inclusive labour market.
The key aims of the project were:
- to sustain lifelong learning through a network of consultants or multipliers;
- to improve the capacity of trade union structures to organise lifelong learning activities and evaluate them;
- to access structural funds.
The project made it possible to create a network of experts with support structures in all regions of Romania who can help employers, workers and unions with the provision of lifelong learning and vocational training.
As part of the project, a report was published in October 2013, Report on the correlation between education and vocational training and labour market demand (in Romanian, 2.5 MB PDF).
Research method
The authors of the report initially examined data for the number of students enrolled in technical streams in high schools, those in vocational schools, and those in post-high school technical schools for supervisors (respectively, technical and vocational education). This information was compared with the number of employees aged 18–24 who had been given vocational training through their workplace that was equivalent to technical and vocational education.
The data were broken down by major occupational groups to analyse the relationship, at national and regional levels, between the options offered by educational and vocational training providers and the demands of the labour market. The ratio between these two aggregates was described by the authors as a ‘semaphore index’.
The authors collated figures about vocational training courses places, based on the number of students enrolled in the first year of courses at technical and vocational schools during the school year 2012–2013. This was compared with the number of employees and unemployed who had a technical and vocational background, aged between 18 and 24 in the reference period of 2007–2012.
Study results and conclusions
One of the initial findings of the research was that in the school year 2012/2013, the distribution of newly enrolled students was as follows:
- technical streams in high schools: 67.5%;
- vocational schools: 5.9%;
- post-high-school education: 26.7%.
This can be compared with the respective rates of 38.3%, 49.2%, and 12.5%, for the school year 2007/2008. The authors attribute the wide discrepancies between these rates to an attempt, between 2009 and 2012, to ‘eliminate vocational education, and concentrate technical learning in the technical streams of technical colleges’.
In the school year 2012/2013, the number of students in post-high school and technical schools for supervisors almost trebled compared to 2007/2008. This trend, claim the authors, is mainly due to the low rate of students going forward for the baccalaureate examination.
The loss in the number of students in technical and vocational schools varies across the development regions, with higher rates in the south, for example in the Muntenia region (14.7% fewer) while in some regions there has been a small increase, such as the south-west region of Oltenia (2.6% more).
The authors’ comparison reveals the imbalance between the number of newly enrolled students by types of technical education, and compared to the number of employees aged 18–24 years.
Shortage of places
The total number of entries to technical and vocational schools in Romania is 20,848 places lower (12.25%) than the labour market’s potential demand; in the technical streams of high schools, there are 2,805 fewer students (2.71%) than the potential demand; and in the vocational schools, 49,275 fewer students (85%) than the labour market’s actual need for trained craftsmen. In contrast, post-high school and supervisors’ schools are offering 31,228 places (just over four-and-a-half times more) than the labour market is likely to be able to absorb.
If analysed by development regions (NUTS 2), the number of students in the whole of the technical and vocational education system exceeds the number of employees by 33.1% in the Bucharest-Ilfov Region; by 29.1% in the South-West Oltenia Region; and by 27.7% in the North-East region. In the other regions the ratio is reversed. There are more employees than students in the South Muntenia Region (40%), in the Western Region (37%), and in the Centre Region (32%).
The distribution of students by occupation shows that almost 70% are employed in one of five occupations: engineering technicians (33.8%), medical assistants (nurses) and midwives (12.1%), call centre operators and desk workers (each with 8%), and IT technicians (6.6%).
The research has identified 48 occupations for which the technical and vocational education system of Romania provides no training and yet which the labour market has potential demand for. At the other extreme, it identified 20 occupations for which the education system provides training even though there is no demand on the domestic labour market for these skills.
Conclusions
The authors identify three major discrepancies between educational options and the market’s demand for labour.
- In all regions, most of the entrants choose the professional category of ‘Technicians and other technical specialisations’ (59.3% of first year students) and yet the professions this describes account for only 6% of Romania’s total workforce, and there are great variations in this figure from region to region.
- Close to one in eight graduates (13.7%) of technical and vocational schools work in unskilled jobs.
- The major group of occupations covered by the category of ‘workers in the services sector’, accounts for 16% to 30% of the workforce, depending on region, yet these courses are taken by between just 0.4 to 4.6% of students.
Commentary
The study serves as a useful instrument for making the necessary projections for education planning that correlates with the predicted requirements of the labour market. To achieve this, it is the authors’ view that companies should take a more active stance to compensate for a certain degree of unresponsiveness in the educational system, although this is also partly due to pressure from students’ parents.
Finally, it is worth noting that the ‘educational oversupply’ which since 2007 has produced more candidates for certain types of job than the Romanian labour market needs, such as nurses and midwives, has also been fuelled by employment opportunities in the wider EU labour market.
Constantin Ciutacu, Institute of National Economy, Romanian Academy