The European Training Foundation’s 2024 assessment identifies vocational education reform as the single highest-impact lever for Georgian labour market improvement.
The European Training Foundation (ETF), the EU agency responsible for supporting vocational education and training reform in partner countries, published its 2024 assessment of Georgia’s skills development system in September 2024. The document — part of the ETF’s annual Torino Process reviews — provides one of the most detailed external analyses of the gap between Georgia’s educational output and its labour market needs, and its findings align closely with GILS’s own research on skills mismatch and education-employment coordination failures.
The ETF assessment identifies three structural weaknesses in Georgia’s vocational education and training (VET) system. First, the qualification framework for VET programmes is not systematically linked to actual labour market demand: courses are designed and certified based on historical programme structures rather than systematic occupational demand analysis. The result is a VET system producing graduates with qualifications that employers do not recognise or require. Second, work-based learning — apprenticeships, internships, and company-based training embedded in VET programmes — remains marginal. Approximately 18 percent of VET students in Georgia have access to structured work-based learning placements, compared to 60–75 percent in EU member states with well-functioning VET systems. Third, the teacher and trainer workforce in VET institutions is ageing and lacks systematic professional development: average instructor age is 54, and fewer than 30 percent have worked in the sector they teach within the past ten years.
These weaknesses are not unknown to Georgian policymakers. The Ministry of Education and Science has published successive VET development strategies since 2013, and the EU has provided substantial financial and technical assistance for VET reform through the EECP programme. But implementation has been slow, and the structural incentives that produce the problems — institutions funded on the basis of student numbers rather than employment outcomes, employers not required to participate in programme design, no accountability mechanism linking qualification recognition to labour market outcomes — have not been addressed.
The ETF assessment makes a specific recommendation that GILS considers particularly important: the introduction of a skills anticipation mechanism at the sectoral level, involving employers, educational institutions, and public employment services in systematic forecasting of skill needs two to five years ahead. Such mechanisms exist in Estonia, Poland, and the Czech Republic, and have demonstrably improved the alignment between educational output and labour market demand over ten-year horizons.
GILS Note: This ETF assessment directly supports GILS’s own findings on education mismatch. The 27 percent overeducation rate documented in GILS’s Education Mismatch Tool reflects the same structural misalignment that the ETF identifies in VET. For the full GILS analysis, including sectoral and demographic breakdowns of skills mismatch, see the Education Mismatch page.
Read the full GILS analysis: https://labour.edu.ge/research/