Chipre

The study benchmarks policies and practices in the community’s workforce development system against international good practices. Specifically, it assesses policies, practices and institutional arrangements, and identifies measures that contributed to workforce development. The study takes advantage of the World Bank’s workforce development diagnostic tool, which is part of the Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) initiative. The SABER-WfD assessed three broad functional dimensions of the community’s workforce development policies based on a collection of primary and secondary evidence on performance in these three areas: strategic framework; system oversight; and service delivery.

The report reviews the youth labour market developments in Cyprus over the past few years and provides labour market projections until 2018. It also assesses existing policies and programmes for youth employment and suggests a number of short- and medium- term measures that the government may consider in its endeavours to tackle the unprecedented youth employment crisis.

The aim of the European credit system for vocational education and training (ECVET) is to allow individuals to gain a full vocational education and training (VET) qualification, or to update/upgrade their VET qualifications in a flexible way, by use of credits.

ECVET requires qualifications to be described in terms of learning outcomes that will be then defined as units that might translate into credits. Learning outcomes recognised in form of credits may be transferred between education and training institutions, whether in the same country or abroad, and accumulated towards achieving a full or a partial qualification. If the VET system allows it, learning acquired in non-formal and informal settings may be assessed and validated as credits to be used for transfer and accumulation purposes. In this context, ECVET is more likely to reach its full potential if linked to the European qualifications framework (EQF)/national qualifications framework (NQF) developments that support the description of qualifications in terms of learning outcomes, as well as with national arrangements and practices for validating non-formal and informal learning.

This report covers ECVET developments in 38 countries and regions up to September 2013; it is the fourth since 2010, when Cedefop started its regular ECVET analysis in relation to national VET reforms. The deadlines of the ECVET recommendation set 2013 as the year for ECVET’s gradual application to VET qualifications at all levels of the EQF, following more than three years of testing and development.