The impact of skills and training on local development

Vocational and professional education and training are activities to provide apprentices and other professional newcomers with conceptual knowledge, technical skills, work experience, social aptitude and self-competency. All these activities will enable professional newcomers to accomplish their work tasks while contributing to the learners’ personal growth. In this context, “development” means competence improvement and thus relates to the individual’s development through learning. Besides such personal development, vocational and professional education and training is also considered a means to foster local development. Whether vocational and professional education and training really improve local development, and under what conditions, is a largely underexplored field. Lewis (1997) already raised this topic in the First Issue of the International Journal of Training and Development. While Lewis (1997) understood “the local” as the systemic and policy-related institutional level of the nation state, this Special Issue includes further spatial scales, especially on subnational level. This Special Issue collates perspectives of vocational education research and economic geography to explore this field that is relevant for academic debates and policymaking.

The Special Issue endeavours to clarify the question if and how vocational and professional education and training foster local development. To this end, the meaning of local development first needs some specification. “Local development” can mean regional-economic growth, local innovative capabilities, sustainable social change and the ecological transition (Fromhold-Eisebith et al., 2014). Hence, it is always necessary to specify the objectives of local development. At the same time, local development as a theoretical and policy-relevant concept requires a comprehensive approach, comprising socio-economic and ecological development.

If the term “local development” relates to research on regions in the Global South and in emerging economies, critiques from dependency theory and postcolonial perspectives must be involved. Then, the question appears who decides about development objectives and measures, and who is involved in these processes. Academic intervention is difficult and raises the question of legitimacy. Korf (2018) distinguishes two attitudes of (Northern) academics who conduct research in the field of international cooperation. On the one side, they take a position of external critique of the global development apparatus and a distant view. On the other side, there is a position that empathically accepts the productive hermeneutic tension between ethical engagement and developmental practices. The positioning within this field of tensions and contradictions is necessary, particularly in cases of international transfer of vocational and professional education and training.

Besides the clarification of “development”, it is necessary to specify the “local”. In many contributions, the “local” is simply “here” or “there”; it is not specified explicitly. As political economy significantly influenced the discourse (Crouch et al., 1999; Fortwengel & Jackson, 2016), research on the macrolevel of nations has long prevailed. Furthermore, studies have provided insights at the workplace (Li & Pilz, 2021). Today, there is a growing field of interdisciplinary contributions that provide a perspective on the subnational level of the region (Gessler, 2017; Li & Pilz, 2021; Pilz & Wiemann, 2020).

The following contributions of this Special Issue are only some examples of emerging topics in the vibrant research field outlined above. They specify some upcoming pathways of the ongoing research within this field.