ENHANCING THE FLEXIBILITY OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING INSTITUTIONS FOR MODERN LABOUR MARKETS

Recent studies suggest that vocational education and training (VET) institutions are becoming important stakeholders in the development of competitive labour force at regional and national level in the lifelong-learning perspective. This requires a new level of flexibility both, for VET institutions and respective public administrations, as modem and competitive training programs need to be offered to various target groups - students, the employed and unemployed population. This obliges the VET institutions also to strengthen their entrepreneurship capacity which is a new challenge for many of them. The aim of the study is to analyse the former opinions of regional public administrators regarding challenges and need for innovative VET developments. Based on this, conclusions have been drawn regarding the compliance of the identified challenges during the time of the survey and the further systemic developments - identified via desk research - that have been implemented to address the challenges. Methods applied in the current paper: analysis of scientific publications, survey of public administrators. For the analysis of the surveys data - descriptive statistical analysis, cross tabulations, Mann-Whitney U test, as well as multivariate statistical analysis method - factor analysis have been applied. In the survey questionnaire for most of the questions the evaluation the scale 1 - 10 was applied to evaluate the attitude of the respondents, where 1 -not significant, 10 - very significant. The research shows that the opinions of regional public administrators represent their foresight ability and understanding of modern labour market developments and the role of VET institutions in the process. It allows to draw the conclusion that the national VET policy developments are in compliance with the regional development needs and the proposed roles among involved stakeholders.