Documents informal education 8 results

"Informal jobs offer skill acquisition opportunities that may facilitate a future switch to formal employment for young workers. In this sense, informal training on the job may be a viable alternative to formal schooling in an economy with a large and diverse informal sector. In this paper, I investigate if these considerations are relevant for the schooling decisions of young individuals using panel data for 17 Latin American countries and micro-level data for Turkey. Specifically, I ask if the prevalence of informal jobs distorts schooling attainment. I concentrate on three measures of schooling outcomes: (1) secondary education enrollment rate; (2) out-of-school rate for lower secondary school; and (3) tertiary education graduation rate. I find that the secondary education enrollment rate is negatively correlated with the size of the informal economy, whereas the out-of-school rate is positively correlated. Moreover, the tertiary education graduation rates tend to fall as the informal employment opportunities increase. This means that informal training on the job may be crowding out school education in developing countries. Policies that can potentially affect the size of the informal sector should take into consideration these second-round effects on aggregate schooling outcomes."

"This book presents, in a European perspective, a comprehensive survey of practices and issues arising in the area of validation of non-formal and informal learning (NFIL). The survey is based on updated results of a project conducted in 2011 and 2012 for the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) by a team from Groupe ALPHA with funding from the European Commission's Employment DG. In a context where the dynamic management of vocational pathways and transitions has been attracting increasing attention, NFIL recognition can benefit a wide range of social groups, in particular the most vulnerable. After a survey of the main NFIL issues and diverse national experiences as regards validation, the book describes these issues in the context of European challenges and policies on education and training, drawing attention to common problems encountered in implementing NFIL validation frameworks and processes, as well as to specific instances of successful implementation programmes. Also broached are the issues of collective bargaining and tripartite dialogue on NFIL validation. Detailed national surveys on the challenges and initiatives of NFIL validation cover a total of ten European countries: Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom. A concluding chapter proposes a set of specific actions designed to improve the visibility of, and access to, NFIL validation"

"The nature of adult education at individual, group and community levels is the concern of this book. Definitions and patterns of adult learning are critically assessed in both this country and abroad, and the processes involved considered in detail. Both case studies and thematic articles have been included and are selected to illustrate the breadth of the field along a number of areas: formal, non-formal and informal education; face-to-face and distance education; from basic levels of education to higher education; from highly deterministic to more ‘open' or self-directed forms of education. It is felt that the study and practice of the education of adults can be best advanced by the adoption of such a broad view. "

"Subjective well-being is primarily treated as an outcome variable in the economic literature. However, is happiness also a driver of behavior and life's outcomes? Rich survey data of recent entrants into unemployment in Germany show that a significant inverted U-shaped relationship exists between residual happiness and an unemployed individual's future reemployment probability and the reentry wage. Residual life satisfaction displays higher (or lower) satisfaction levels than would be predicted by a number of socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. This paper is the first to show that happiness is mainly a predictor for self-employment and less for standard reemployment. Related findings suggest that happiness matters for male unemployed, and the concept of locus of control is able to explain part of the effect. If reemployment and higher wages are considered desirable outcomes for the unemployed individual and society, the shape of the effect suggests an optimal level of happiness, which is not necessarily the highest."

"With young people among the big losers of the recent financial crisis, vocational education and training (VET) is often seen as the silver bullet to the problem of youth joblessness. This paper provides a better understanding of VET around the world, dealing with three types of vocational systems: school-based education, a dual system in which school-based education is combined with firm-based training, and informal training. We first explore the motivation for these different types of training, before summarizing the institutional evidence, highlighting the key elements of each training system and discussing its main implementation strengths and challenges. We subsequently review the evidence on the effectiveness of VET versus general education and between the three VET systems. There are clear indications that VET is a valued alternative beyond the core of general education, while the dual system tends to be more effective than school-based VET. Informal training is effective, however relatively little is known of its relative strengths compared with other forms of vocational education."

" Managers of knowledge-intensive organizations are required to keep their knowledge and skills up to date in order to steer their companies through a volatile environment. The current demographic shift prompts the question how learning may be facilitated for increasingly older managers. In this article, we argue that the approach to informal learning at work is an important concept to predict the outcomes of managers in knowledge-intensive organizations. We set out to investigate how chronological age affects learning approaches and, in turn, learning outcomes in a sample of 139 Austrian bank managers. Results of a path analysis show that deep learning increases and surface-disorganized learning decreases learning outcomes, operationalized as performance in the last job appraisal, development of job-specific core skills, perceived career development, and subjective job performance. Furthermore, we have found that older managers more often use a surface-disorganized learning approach, which in turn leads to lower learning outcomes. In sum, this study integrates research about aging and learning within organizations and helps to explain the mechanism by which age affects learning outcomes."