Thailand: A successful marriage of education, labour needs

EDUCATION

By Wannapa Khaopa
The Nation



Aussies match higher education courses to workforce demands

About 200,000 Thais graduate each year with bachelor degrees, but not all can find jobs. The rising number of unemployed graduates stems from a disturbing mismatch of university education and labour market requirements.

For a better balance, Thailand may need a national agenda. This is what Scott Evans, an education counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Bangkok, told an audience last week at the United Nations Conference on Creative Education for Sustainable Achievements: New Ways to Learn.

Evans said globalisation had not only brought changes to Australia, but to most countries across the world, including Thailand. So, it may be time for Thailand to adapt to such changes by enhancing its human capital and labour productivity, and try to move the country forward in a world that is "getting smaller".

Australia established a national Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations in 2007 to help its education and employment officials work together, by getting to know each side's needs.

"With education and employment policymakers in the same department and the same building and with same direct management structure, we are forced to take notice of the intersection between education policy and workforce policy. The education department - it cannot develop separate education policy and market needs," Evans said.

Combining the two groups had been successful, he said, as they could match policy to develop the supply and the demand sides in terms of education and the reality of Australian work market.

The policy synergies were much better and the mix between employment and education was now much stronger.

Scott said Australia had implemented a national productivity agenda as well, with collaboration from Federal, state and territory governments.

With higher education levels tied to higher earnings and lower rates of unemployment, he said the agenda focused on investing in skills and the participation of students and workers across the life cycle.

Australia has initiated a national curriculum for every state and territory government to apply. But the curriculum is flexible and allows each local government to include other useful or creative courses for students.

So far, it has invested A$16 billion (Bt448.28 billion) to provide better educational infrastructure.

Australia has estimated that best practice investment in early childhood could generate an average increase of 0.6 per cent to baseline GDP and 1.1 per cent in employment every year to 2040.

And increasing the proportion of population with postschool qualifications could generate an average increase of 2.9 per cent to baseline GDP and 1.4 per cent in employment every year up to 2040.

Meanwhile, with the goal to be competitive in industry and technology internationally, Japan at first focused on strengthening basic education.

For Prof Tatsuji Seki, from Osaka University's Bangkok Centre for Education and Research, good basic knowledge makes it is easier to develop highquality workers, who can help develop technology and industry, whereas universities can focus on research.

"Now, Japanese cars are found all over the world. About 120 years ago our country opened to the world. So, when we opened our country, what kind of education did we need at that time?" he said

"We thought we should include basic knowledge at the first, so we can have many highquality technicians at the beginning, and after that we can make the cars, radios and cameras."

After the World War II, he said the government put an emphasis on keeping educational standards high.

Students had equal opportunity to access quality education. Some test results showed that 44 students from Japan's 44 prefectures had almost the same quality of education.

The majority of students had very good acquired knowledge necessary for each grade, compared with other countries.

The UN conference was part of several that took place under the theme "MegaTrends in Human Capital and Labour Productivity towards Global Integration".

Hosted by the Labour Ministry's Department of Skills Development, the Thailand Productivity Institute, Industry Ministry and Federation of Thai Industries, the event aimed to build policy framework on a strategic national plan for human capital and labour productivity based on output from the conference.

For Thailand, productivity in the industrial, agricultural and service sectors must be increased, along with a balance of workforce and labour market demands.


-- The Nation 2010-07-19