Naslov
Skills Matching in the Croatian SME Sector and Competence Based Education and Training: Progress and Prospects

Autori
Čučković, Nevenka ; Bartlett, Will

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Poglavlja u knjigama, znanstveni

Knjiga
Labour Market and Skills in the Western Balkans

Urednik/ci
Arandarenko, Mihail ; Bartlett, Will

Izdavač
FREN - Foundation for the Advancement of Economics ; London School of Economics

Grad
Beograd

Godina
2012

Raspon stranica
155-175

ISBN
978-86-916185-0-6

Ključne riječi
Labour market, skills matching, Croatia, SME sector, competence based eduvation
(Labour market, skills matching, Croatia, SME sector, competence based eduvatio)

Sažetak
As the full accession to the EU approaches, the SME sector in Croatia faces dynamic changes in demand for highly skilled labour in order to better cope with competition coming from EU. In the last three-four years there have been several policy attempts to better identify the needed skills for the future jobs in SME sector and corresponding training and education needs in Croatia. This seams of utmost importance given the fact that SME sector employs around two third of total number of employed in Croatia and future competitiveness of Croatian economy in the EU will very much depend upon whether education and training systems efficiently equip the new labour with right skills. According to two TNA surveys done for Croatian Chamber of Commerce in 2009 and 2011, it has been identified that Croatian SMEs have been relying predominantly on a low and medium-skilled labour (60% of the surveyed SMEs employ labour with secondary school education), although there are encouraging signs that this is beginning to change towards employment of more high-skilled graduates especially in service industries. The government has made efforts to promote competence based education and included entrepreneurship as a key competence and skill throughout official curriculum in order to better ground entrepreneurial culture into the institutional fabric. It has also developed national monitoring and evaluation assessment frameworks of such skills for the future. Although this is the step into right direction that would accelerate responsiveness of education and training systems to the emerging needs of the business, nevertheless, most of the SMEs fail to use the existing state subsidies, incentives and tax reliefs for further skilling and training its labour. The struggle for survival in economic recession might be one of the explanations. The other is that SMEs which rely on lower-skilled labour can be expected to have little interest in taking up the opportunities for further training and education of their labour. Therefore, the explanation for the low take-up and low effectiveness of training, education and knowledge-transfer policies lies just as much on the imbalances between the present “demand side” as it does on the “supply side”, or in the effective design of the policies and programs. The paper will analyze the current progress towards anticipation and better matching of the education and training systems to future job skills in SME sector in Croatia and identify policy –oriented solutions to the remaining problems.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Ekonomija

POVEZANOST RADA