Dual Vocational Education‚ A Guarantee for “Young People” or an Additional Bail-Out Fund: What Can Be Done About Youth Unemployment in Europe?

How can the problem of youth unemployment be solved? Volker Rieke, German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, presents the Ministry’s bilateral vocational training cooperation as a contribution towards greater youth employment in Europe. At the request of partner countries, a strategy is jointly developed to modernize vocational training systems whereby the implementation of the elements and principles of the dual system are in the foreground. Gerhard Bosch, University of Duisburg-Essen, highlights that high youth unemployment has structural and economic roots and must be tackled with a range of different measures. The introduction of dual vocational training requires a restructuring of institutions that can only be achieved in the long-term. Friedrich Hubert Esser, Federal Institute for Professional Training, Bonn, underlines that the labour market risk for young people is heavily influenced by the current situation of the respective national labour markets, which, in turn, depends crucially on economic structures and forces. It would therefore be impossible to resolve the problems currently experienced by many countries in southern Europe in this respect merely by reforming their vocational training systems can only be resolved in a longer-term perspective by taking into account the respective situational factors. Klaus-Dieter Sohn and Sebastian Czuratis, Centre for European Policy, Freiburg, identify four areas that require reform: 1. Training should be oriented towards companies’ needs, and dual vocational training represents one successful strategy for achieving this. 2. The minimum wage should be abolished. 3. Greater employee flexibility should be promoted. 4. The labour market should be made more flexible. Felix Rauner, University of Bremen, also sees the introduction of the dual training system as an instrument for fighting youth unemployment. He notes, however, that its introduction presupposes long-term economic development processes and the transformation of education traditions. Günter Lambertz, German Chambers of Commerce and Industry, highlights that close links between the education and labour markets are crucial to the success of the vocational training system in German-speaking countries. Training within companies ensures that it is oriented towards the latter’s current needs. With purely school-based forms of education outside companies, on the other hand, the danger of false orientation is great. This also applies to systems that rely one-sidedly on academic education. As far as the issue of exporting dual vocational training is concerned, it is important to get companies on board first for this reason.