Introduction
Enterprise investment in continuing vocational training,
designed to promote human capital resources, is a key dynamic of economic
performance, competitiveness, and employment in Europe and reflects the role of
enterprises in resolving labour market imperfections and employment imbalances.
A high quality data set reflecting the continuing
vocational training activities of European enterprises is an indispensable
asset in the assessment of enterprise competitiveness and workforce
employability and is key to the analysis of
·
labour
skills supply and demand;
·
the
forms, skills targeted and volume of training offered and training needs;
·
the
enterprises’ own internal provision of vocational training as a function of
that provided on the external market;
·
costs
of enterprise based vocational training;
·
effectiveness
of CVT activities and public funding initiatives.
Before 2005, the
continuing vocational training survey (CVTS) has been carried out under
“gentlemen’s agreements” between countries and Eurostat. As from 2005, it is
based on European legislation.
CVTS 1 (reference
year 1993)
The first CVTS (CVTS 1) was carried out in 1994 in the then 12 Member
States of the European Union and was part of the action programme for the development
of continuing vocational training in the European Community (FORCE) based on
Council Decision 90/267/EEC of 29 May 1990.
CVTS
2 (reference year 1999)
The growing policy interest in data on continuing
vocational training in enterprises together with the demand for CVT data to
cover the 15 Member States led the Commission to promote a second and further
developed continuing vocational training survey (CVTS 2) in 1999. This survey,
coordinated by the Statistical Office of the European Union (Eurostat), was
carried out in all the EU Member States, in Norway and in nine candidate
countries.
CVTS
3 (reference year 2005)
The third implementation (CVTS 3) was carried out in
2006 with reference to 2005 CVT activities. It was for the first time underpinned
by a European legal act, Regulation (EC) No 1552/2005 of the
European Parliament and of the Council of 7 September 2005 on statistics
relating to vocational training in enterprises. Implementing details were
provided in Commission Regulation (EC) No 198/2006.
The development of the CVTS 3 survey has been supported
by all Member States and Norway, Trade Unions (ETUC), CEDEFOP, as well as the
Commission Directorate-General Education and Culture (DG EAC) and the
Directorate-General Employment, social affairs and equal opportunities (DG
EMPL) in order to:
·
retain
compatibility with CVTS 2 while correcting for known deficiencies,
·
focus
on key policy user needs and the specific demands of the regulation,
·
reduce
the burden of the survey on enterprises compared to previous implementations,
·
improve
the quality of key variables and the dataset as a whole,
·
extend
the survey to cover, for the first time, questions on costs and participation
in initial vocational training (IVT),
·
reinforce
the national quality reporting framework,
·
understand
better the reasons why enterprises do not train.
CVTS
4 (reference year 2010)
An amendment to the Regulation (EC) No 198/2006 was
prepared in 2009-2010 in order to further improve the quality of the results on
vocational training in enterprises and lower the statistical burden on
enterprises as well as to ensure coherence with the information coming from the
Adult Education Survey (AES). Commission Regulation (EU) No 822/2010
adapted the codification scheme, sampling, precision and quality requirements
for CVTS 4. Compared to CVTS 3, the following was changed.
Simplification of the list of variables:
CVTS 3 variables which are not required for breakdowns of the CVTS results any
longer and which are available from the AES and the LFS have been suppressed.
This concerns in particular some quantitative breakdowns (e.g. by sex and age
or distribution of training hours by field of training or by provider) and some
questions on disadvantaged groups. The module on initial vocational training
(IVT) has been significantly simplified as the 2005 data collection put forward
many implementation issues which hampered the comparability across countries.
Other sources can however be considered to provide information on IVT costs
such as the UNESCO-OECD-Eurostat (UOE) joint data collection on education
systems.
Standard questionnaire:
the order of the questions was changed and few adjustments on questions related
to enterprise training strategies were introduced in order to improve the
relevance and quality of the results. This covered a widening of some filters
on variables on enterprises strategies requested only to training enterprises
in the past.
Optional variables
were proposed in the implementation manual in order to contribute to the
harmonisation of data collected by few Member States.
Few new variables
were added to highlight in particular how continuing vocational training can
reply to enterprise future skill needs.
Precision requirements
were adapted to the classification of economic activities NACE Rev. 2 as well
as additional requirements for the representativeness of the results in large
countries. (i.e. using a stratification based on 6 enterprise classes instead
of 3 in the past) as this ensures the production of more accurate EU results.
CVTS
5 (reference year 2015)
Despite of the streamlining of contents (i.e. a
significant reduction of variables) that took place for CVTS 4 (reference year
2010), the still considerable burden on respondents as well as quality concerns
made the CVTS a controversial survey within the European Statistical System
(ESS) and at the meeting of the ESS Committee in May 2011, CVTS was earmarked
as negative priority.
Indeed, when reviewing CVTS 2010 results, issues such as
the length and burden of the survey, quality problems of the quantitative
variables (costs, participants), possible overlap with other enterprise surveys
and low response rates were identified.
At the same time, CVTS is the only integrated source for
collecting CVT costs, participation of persons employed in CVT and CVT
strategies of enterprises, and there is a persistent strong policy demand for
comparable data on vocational training in enterprises. In order to investigate
alternative ways to collect relevant data for CVT, Eurostat together with a
dedicated Task Force explored the feasibility of an alternative approach for
CVT data provision but this work had to conclude that for the time being only
CVTS can provide the requested data.
With the aim of
further reducing the burden of CVTS to the extent possible, the list of
variables was further shortened and simplified whenever possible. However, in
view of the major streamlining that took place between 2005 (CVTS 3) and 2010
(CVTS 4), it was necessary to find a good balance between further burden
reduction and keeping the survey relevant. This work resulted in Commission Regulation (EU) No 1153/2014
which provides the list of variables covered by CVTS 5. The draft of this
Regulation had been supported by all Member States at the meeting of the ESS
Committee in May 2014 (EEA/EFTA was against. Switzerland abstained).