July 2020

The International Vocational Education Standard Committee (IVESC) plan to carry out professional accreditation in China, with its branch in Hong Kong, signaling a significantly strengthened focus on vocational education certification outside mainland.

With it’s aim to be a globally recognized and leading regional independent quality assurance body in professional accreditation for vocational graduates.

The plan priorities reform of professional vocational accreditation in China and expands it to Hong Kong by providing professional accreditation to better equip the labor force to meet the demands of the economy now and into the future.

The plan is also quite timely due to the increasing number of vocational graduates in the past recent years. It seeks to raise the status of vocational education - an attempt to eradicate a common mindset that vocational education is a “second choice” to an academic degree. It aims to transform the system from having a “quantity focus” to a “quality focus” with greater importance being placed on professional quality. It also seeks to increase the proportion of highly skilled and professionally accredited vocational

graduates and ultimately lead to increase in vocational education opportunities.

With innovation and skills being the currency of the new economy, the once strongly-held perception that training in work-related skills is second best to an academic education or even “low-class” is changing around the world.

In Hong Kong, however, change is taking place at a much slower pace. This is mostly due to a deeply rooted mindset that competency-based training is inferior to the pursuit of academic excellence.

Hence, pupils often only turn to skills training as a backup plan, after realizing they have not made the cut to enter the city’s eight public universities and 19 self-financing degree-awarding institutions .

And IVESC hopes to adhere with Hong Kong’s Qualification Framework which was intended to “enhance the competitiveness of the workforce in Hong Kong.” This framework is available to students in schools as well as adults in the workforce, and allows employers and employees to set learning targets as well as providing an informal “curriculum” for students to move through the pathways. The plan to carry out vocational skills certification in Hong Kong will strengthen the Vocational Education industry even more and can open various doors of opportunities for Hong Kong citizens to find suitable career in Mainland China and vice versa. IVESC consider it prompt in order to upgrade Hong Kong's competitiveness in the rapidly changing global environment at a faster pace and to support the development of a diversified economy.

IVESC’s vision is to ensure that more people would be able to catch up both on the local and global race’ – to prepare young people to learn a living in a globalized, digitized and complex world.

This requires an education system with strengthened goals and an urgency to ensure we provide an education worth having. The purpose of learning and what and how we learn is the dominant international dialogue. And by providing professional vocational certification we will be a step closer to winning that race.

To be the new drivers in education is also one of IVESC priority. And by expanding it’s services to Hong Kong it’s turning a new chapter in professional vocational accreditation. All other sectors in our economy and society have been undergoing enormous change. Innovation, experimentation and constant adaption to change is essential. It is true then that learning is everybody’s business – government, unions, early childhood centers, schools and universities, industry and not for profit organizations. Hong Kong and China needs a more vibrant learning ecosystem and IVESC wants to be on the frontier of that change.

Transformation requires professional leadership. It is therefore essential to engage learners in learning that is deep and meaningful, building world class competencies.

There is an emerging shared agenda – to rethink professional capabilities; to design approaches to professional learning characterized by learning that is high quality, deeply personal and at scale; and to build team capabilities, collective purpose and relational trust. And these transformation needs to be enacted across all levels of the system, that is the reason why IVESC plans to expand it’s vocational skills certification In Hong Kong.