Note: this publication has been superseded. It Presented information on vocational education and training undertaken by students as part of their senior secondary certificate of education in 2020.
Student equity in VET: participation, achievement, and outcomes highlights how different equity groups fare in their VET journey.
This report brings together information collected by NCVER, the ABS and the Department of Education and Training to provide data on students enrolled in school, VET and higher education.
The main socio-demographic characteristics associated with being persistently not employed, in education or training (NEET) are early school leaving and having children.
This research summary provides evidence of the changing nature of apprenticeships over a 20-year period (1996–2016), with a focus on a comparison of trade and non-trade apprentices and trainees.
This report examines the responsiveness of ‘older’ workers — aged 25 to 54 years — to government subsidies for upskilling and explores how enrolment and course choice responses varies by age, gender and disadvantage.
This research report examines the underutilisation of the skills of migrants in regional areas, particularly women who are often the spouse of a primary applicant but are also skilled in their own right.
This study goes beyond looking at how the financial return to training varies with qualification level and investigates the relationship between literacy skills and the incomes of workers in the Australian labour market and whether this varies with level of education.
This research shows that older Australians use computers and the internet less than younger Australians. Therefore, in the short term, information and services aimed at older Australians will need to be provided in additional ways.
This study provides new evidence on the inter-relationships between Indigenous Australians' association with their traditional culture and their engagement with vocational education and training.
What would prompt people to undertake education and training in their mid-20s and beyond and what are the benefits? The authors investigate what motivates people to undertake education and training at more mature ages and the impact of this on their labour market outcomes. They found that males who undertake further education and training after the age of 25 years did so for reasons related to their current employment (for example, towards promotion or a different job), whereas for females a key motivator was simply getting a job. For both males and females, a sustained increase in job satisfaction following completion of the study was also found. Data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics of Australia Survey and the Survey of Education and Training was used in this report.
In this podcast, Sue Webb, a researcher, talks about the initial findings from work looking at the use of migrant women's skills in regional areas.
Lorraine Dearden talks in this podcast about work she has co-authored on widening participation in higher education in the United Kingdom (UK).
This paper provides a conceptual basis for a three-year (2011–13) research program exploring the capacity of individuals and groups to make transitions through learning, training and work across locations. Three research projects will examine how regional or community factors and social capital affect those transitions. The three projects are: the influence of job conditions on geographic labour mobility; migrant women in regional Australia; and neighbourhood factors in the decision to participate in post-school education and training and the labour market. A synopsis of each project is given in this paper.
Encouraging older workers to stay in the workforce has become a policy priority. At the same time, the life expectancy of Australians has increased dramatically over the past several decades, effectively inserting a new stage in the life course, often called the 'third age'. This report explores the possibility of using that third age to embark on an encore career, a concept originating in the United States. The author then focuses on the role the VET sector might play in developing encore careers in Australia.
Using interviews with adult migrants over a period of two years, the authors look at how undertaking an English as a second language (ESL) class helps to facilitate integration into Australian society.
One of the significant challenges facing Australia is the ageing of the population. This challenge has led policy-makers to consider how older workers can be kept in the workforce. To help generate discussion on older workers, NCVER commissioned six researchers to draft essays on various issues around keeping older Australians engaged with the workforce. These essays, and responses by six additional discussants, were presented at a roundtable held in Canberra in May 2011. Themes to arise from the roundtable included the need to consider the diversity of older workers, the challenges of low literacy and numeracy skills for some older workers, discrimination and stereotypes, and the recognition that not all older workers want to keep working.
Using the 1995 cohort of the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth, this project examines how long it takes for young people to move from education to work, and identifies factors that distinguish people who are able to move quickly into employment from those who take many months to find work.
This paper was presented at the International Symposium on Lifelong Learning for Poverty Alleviation and Sustainable Development: Developing a Research Agenda for the Asia-Pacific in Hong Kong, 12-13 January 2011. Tom Karmel suggests that there are four implications of an ageing population: the need to improve labour force participation and productivity; the ageing population will provide a 'demographic dividend' because there will be fewer young people to school; increasing life expectancy changes the arithmetic of the return to investments in human capital and makes investment in the middle-aged more attractive; and ageing populations in developed countries provide an opportunity for developing countries through the export of labour services.
This paper was prepared for the Australian Government's National Resources Sector Employment Taskforce, which was created to investigate the extent to which skill shortages might impact on the development of the resources sector. It applies historical apprenticeship commencement rates to population projections to provide an estimate of the number of tradespeople likely to be working in the resources sector between 2010 20 at a detailed level and by region.