Lee Hyeongjae, Hong Inho
Graduate School of Data Science, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, Korea.
Center for Humans and Machines, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.
PLoS One. 2025 Aug 21;20(8):e0329405. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0329405. eCollection 2025.
Assessing the potential influence of Vocational Education and Training (VET) courses on creating job opportunities and nurturing work skills has been considered challenging due to the ambiguity in defining their complex relationships and connections with the local economy. Here, we quantify the potential influence of VET courses and explain it with future economy and specialization by constructing a network of more than 17,000 courses, jobs, and skills in Singapore's SkillsFuture data based on their text similarities captured by a text embedding technique, Sentence Transformer. We find that VET courses associated with Singapore's 4th Industrial Revolution economy demonstrate higher influence than those related to other future economies. The course influence varies greatly across different sectors, attributed to the level of specificity of the skills covered. Lastly, we show a notable concentration of VET supply in certain occupation sectors requiring general skills, underscoring a disproportionate distribution of education supply for the labor market.
评估职业教育培训（VET）课程对创造就业机会和培养工作技能的潜在影响一直被认为具有挑战性，因为在定义它们与当地经济的复杂关系和联系时存在模糊性。在此，我们通过基于句子转换器（Sentence Transformer）这种文本嵌入技术所捕获的文本相似性，构建一个包含新加坡“技能创前程”（SkillsFuture）数据中17000多个课程、工作和技能的网络，来量化VET课程的潜在影响，并通过未来经济和专业化来解释这种影响。我们发现，与新加坡第四次工业革命经济相关的VET课程比与其他未来经济相关的课程表现出更高的影响力。课程影响力在不同部门之间差异很大，这归因于所涵盖技能的具体程度。最后，我们表明在某些需要通用技能的职业部门中，VET供给显著集中，这凸显了劳动力市场教育供给的不均衡分布。
