WorldSkills International
Posted by Francesca on August 26th, 2009Well, ladies and gents, member of the DSF cohort are headed to Calgary to take part in the Worldskills International competition. I mean that in a general way, obviously, not in a way that suggests DSF staff have a secret life revolving around hairdressing apprenticeships or a gift for bricklaying. They might do of course, they just haven’t confided in me.
In an effort to fully enable living vicariously through their travels, there are lots of things those of us back home can look at. WorldSkills Australia and International have will be videoing the event, while Judy Turnbull (intrepid DSF staffer in the field) will be tweeting, blogging and vox popping to her heart’s delight.
So a bit of food for the vicarious traveller… here’s Calgary at its prettiest.
Stay tuned!
OECD. Capitalising on WorldSkills, the OECD held a one day conference/showcase titled “Competing for Skills: VET in the 21st Century”. What the presentations from member countries clearly showed was that the global policy agenda has coalesced around a set of very similar ideas about how VET can be deployed to help solve economic problems. This meant that there were no novel solutions, but rather the recycling of ideas that are recorded as having worked in the past. This is not to say that the ideas were without merit, rather that these were cyclical solutions to a global financial crisis that is widely recognised now as structural. Some structural solutions came in the keynote address delivered by Jack Dusseldorp, who framed his address with three macro-level themes for VET in the 21st century: identity, mobility and sustainability. For further details have a look at Jack’s paper which has been posted on this site.