In today's rapidly changing world a constant renewal of knowledge and skills in every human endeavour can be observed. The characteristics of workers and the jobs that they perform have been attended by technological, social, and political change on a global scale. New forms of employment have made work more mobile to an extent never experienced before. An increasing proportion of workers no longer need come to their employer's job site in order to do their work. The instability of employment is creating a new breed of workers who know how to move efficiently from one job to another. As a consequence workers need flexible qualifications to perform jobs. Key qualifications are the answer! Key qualifications provide the key to rapid and effective acquisition of new knowledge and skills. First, qualifications enable workers to react effectively to, and exercise initiative in, changes to their work. Second, qualifications enable workers to shape their own career in a time of diminishing job security, nowadays frequently defined as employability'.

This text takes up the debate about matching vocational education with the labour market, and shows progress in terms of theoretical models, tools (transformation and matching processes), and learning environments. The contributions address the concepts of qualifications and skilling, the role, strengths and weaknesses of practical training, models and processes of becoming skilled, and whether or not one should try to plan the content of vocational programmes in accordance with changing qualifications requirements and skill needs in the labour market is the essential question.

Corporate training and effective performance have become major issues in the 1980s and '90s. Reviews of the training research literature show that, parallel to the growing attention to corporate training, research has also increased in the field, giving a better understanding of the subject and providing fundamental expertise on which trainers can build. The contributions to the book differ in the degree to which they are related to performance issues, but all chapters underline the necessity of thinking from the perspective of effective performance.

In today's rapidly changing world a constant renewal of knowledge and skills in every human endeavour can be observed. The characteristics of workers and the jobs that they perform have been attended by technological, social, and political change on a global scale. New forms of employment have made work more mobile to an extent never experienced before. An increasing proportion of workers no longer need come to their employer's job site in order to do their work. The instability of employment is creating a new breed of workers who know how to move efficiently from one job to another. As a consequence workers need flexible qualifications to perform jobs. Key qualifications are the answer! Key qualifications provide the key to rapid and effective acquisition of new knowledge and skills. First, qualifications enable workers to react effectively to, and exercise initiative in, changes to their work. Second, qualifications enable workers to shape their own career in a time of diminishing job security, nowadays frequently defined as `employability'.

This book takes up the debate about matching vocational education with the labour market and shows progress in terms of theoretical models, tools (transformation and matching processes), and learning environments. The solutions, showing up the need for core or key skills, the necessity of embedding learning skills in authentic and guided learning environments, shows a perspective of research and developmen-tal work to be tested in schools and in workplaces, to find better curricula for a better skilling.

Corporate training and effective performance have become major issues in the 1980s and '90s. Reviews of the training research literature show that, parallel to the growing attention to corporate training, research has also increased in the field, giving a better understanding of the subject and providing fundamental expertise on which trainers can build. The contributions to the book differ in the degree to which they are related to performance issues, but all chapters underline the necessity of thinking from the perspective of effective performance.

In this volume, the authors treat flexibility as a system characteristic of Vocational Education and Training (VET), in analyzing key conditions for flexibility:
-economic context of VET and the organizational and institutional design of VET;
-educational tools and resources for the flexibility of delivery and pathways at national level;
-VET professionals as promoters of flexibility, mobility, and transferability.