Analysis of the effectiveness of vocational education in terms of labour market demand in Poland

Abstract

Vocational education is an important topic in the context of human capital. This is due to the mere fact of the Copenhagen process, which for over 15 years has been aiming to improve the quality of education in the European Union. Nevertheless, the state ofvocational education in this area is far from expected. In this case, the Polish vocational education system is one of the most negative examples [Polcyn, Gawrysiak 2017, p. 13], both in the context of the level of unemployment, as well as the clarity andcoherence of the system itself. The authors have attempted to explore the reasons for this condition in the context of the effectiveness of vocational education in terms of labour market demand, based on the data from 2016 at NTS-4 level. The analysis used thenew database of the Occupation Barometer, data prepared by the Polish Central Statistical Office on the number of students trained according to the ISCED-F 2013 international classification, and social and economic measures were taken into account. The resultsof linear models indicate the lack of a direct relationship between education in five most numerous ISCED-F 2013 narrow fields in Poland and demand on the labour market, according to the data from Occupation Barometer. The authors additionally propose a newmeasure of effectiveness, based on the collected data, and present an example of its use in the logistic regression method. The results show possible issues resulting from vocational schools management and vocational education “inertia”.