A skilled and well-educated labor force is crucial for every country’s economic development. As the Kurdistan Region–Iraq’s (KRI’s) economy is developing rapidly, it is creating jobs that require a solid education and technical skills. Providing the KRI’s labor force with needed skills will be a priority for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

Over the past few years, the KRG has launched an ambitious reform of basic and secondary education to increase its quality and has expanded opportunities for tertiary technical and university education (Vernez, Culbertson, and Constant, 2012). But expansion of secondary vocational education has lagged, leaving many students...

In this chapter, we first provide an overview of the TVET system in the KRI. We then discuss the characteristics of its secondary, tertiary, and adult components, including their institutional supporting arrangements, curricula, occupational offerings, and teacher qualification requirements. Finally, we review ongoing and planned initiatives for growth and improvement of the system before summarizing our findings and their implications.

Three ministries provide TVET, targeting different populations of students:

The Ministry of Education (MOE) offers secondary students (grades 10 through 12)vocational education(ISCED 3).¹ The 32 secondary-level vocational schools enrolled 8,600 students in 2011–12, or 3 percent of...

Education and training institutions require systematic information about the demand for employees and skills in order to set occupational standards, to determine what occupational programs to offer, to determine the level of student enrollment desirable, and to design curricula. Data on the skills requirements of the private sector in particular have not been collected, yet are essential to promoting its further growth and development.

This chapter relies primarily on data from the 2012 Kurdistan Region Labor Force Survey¹ and the RAND Survey of Business Establishments also fielded in 2012 to analyze current employment patterns in the KRI to gain a...

The Kurdistan Region—Iraq is not unique in its need to develop successful TVET programs. Several countries have developed such successful programs and use them to develop their workforces and meet other societal goals.

In this chapter, we present findings from a review of selected case-study countries (Germany, Finland, Jordan, Korea, Tunisia, and Turkey) and international literature on TVET systems and programs. In selecting these countries, we sought to represent a variety of TVET models in countries with highly regarded TVET systems, in developed and developing countries (including countries in the Middle East), and with populations similar in size to...

The KRG is taking steps to expand and improve its TVET system. They include plans to create three large secondary vocational centers with places for 10,000 students in each. In this chapter, we present a roadmap to build on these efforts to make the system more responsive to both student and employer needs. We offer recommendations in support of the KRG’s plans, drawing on our overview of KRI’s current TVET system in Chapter Two, our survey and analysis of KRI employers and the skills they need in Chapter Three, and our review of international TVET policies and practices in Chapter...