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    Building up Employability: Evidence from Curriculum Updates in the Netherlands

    23 January 2025

    MAG 2024-II. Authors: Ziyue Zhu (Universiteit Maastricht – School of Business and Economics).

    Trends like digitalization and the energy transition are major drivers of changes in the demand for skills in the labor market. Vocational education and training (VET) play a crucial role to train students for practical roles and prepare them for these changes. This study focuses on Dutch VET graduates and investigates the consequences of curriculum updates. From text descriptions of VET curricula, I construct a measurement for the skills graduates learned in school and identify the emerging patterns of skill supply in the Netherlands, with a specific focus on technical and social skills, differentiated by VET degree. I match these quantifications of skill supply to graduates’ survey and administrative microdata from Statistics Netherlands to investigate the extent to which curriculum updates relate to labor market outcomes such as employment, wages, and skill mismatches. Using advanced econometric techniques, I identify the causal effect between the curriculum updates and labor market outcomes.

    Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.