The reforms taking place in the vocational colleges are among the most vital for the future of the job market. They are being led by Tair Ifergan, who serves as Head of the National Institute for Technology and Science.
The initiative, which is being accompanied by MAOZ, began over a year-and-a-half ago. One of the biggest challenges is building trust and creating partnerships between the government entity and college heads in the wake of years of tension and lack of cooperation. To assist with this, a joint fact-finding trip to Finland was set up. Tair hoped that the trip would help everyone drive through a reform that would connect vocational training to the industry’s needs.
The trip had a significant impact and helped the participants reimagine how such a partnership might work in practice, as well as how to create industry partnerships, and determining how to tailor training and education to its needs. To ensure that the findings would be implemented in practice, the participants were asked to outline experiments, beginning during the trip itself: which of their findings regarding the relationship between training and industry would they be implementing tomorrow morning at their desks?
MAOZ began accompanying six experiments, each different in scope: one was related to high-quality recruitment of Arab students and minimizing drop-out rates. Another focused on establishing a regional connection between employers and colleges in a given area. A third experiment examined updating the syllabus of subjects with high demand in the job market.
Even now, projects that began as experiments are changing the reality on the ground. That is the case, for example, with one of the experiments that examined updating the training program to make it more relevant for the job market. Following the update, one engineer at Strauss Group predicted: “In my opinion, the training will reduce the time it takes to mentor new employees in the factory by half: from 20 months to 10 months.”