TVET sits at the heart of the youth employment challenge. It is often the primary bridge between education and the labour market, yet many systems remain persistently mismatched. Employers cannot find the talent they need, while young people are trained in skills that industry no longer values. This session asks a deceptively simple question: what data do we actually need to inform TVET decision-making, and how can it be organized to drive better action? The challenge is rarely a lack of data, but the fragmentation of what already exists, and the gap between collecting it and acting on it.
The session examines the landscape of data sources shaping TVET decisions today: from traditional administrative and survey data, to public-facing digital instruments such as UNESCO’s Global Skills Tracker and OECD’s Skills for Jobs Database, to the private real-time labour-market data increasingly powering those very instruments. It asks what each source is actually built to answer, and, just as importantly, what it structurally cannot. The discussion is grounded in a concrete national case study from WorldSkills UK.
The underlying objective of the session is to understand what it would take for data to flow coherently – from learner, through training institution, through national policy – closing the loop between labour-market signal and skills offer
