Public-private partnerships to solve the skills gap?

Abstract

This article focuses on the issue of the ‘skills gap’ and the possibility for governments to stimulate collaborative partnerships between educational institutions and businesses (‘public-private partnerships’) to reduce this gap. The Dutch government initialized several such initiatives to realize regional public-private partnerships in vocational and higher education (Ministry of Education, 2017; Ministry of Economic Affairs, 2018), but also within the private sector alone, to stimulate cooperation to bridge the skills gap. The government implemented an incentive to build partnerships with much freedom to set goals and activities and to focus on experimentation and learning, with the requirement of co-funding and shared goals among partners. Partnerships might be able to achieve results that colleges or companies could never hope to attain alone (‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’). Based on an analysis of 48 partnerships up until 2017, this appears to be true: partnerships can engage in a large variety of activities that each partner alone would not have accomplished; and can reflect and adapt based on their progress. However, the power relationship within the partnerships appears to have a strong tendency to lean towards the education institution, leading to goal displacement regarding their primary goal and the termination of activities that are perceived as difficult by the education institution, in the Netherlands most notably lifelong learning. This causes concern about the likelihood of involvement of (smaller) companies in the long term. The position of the less powerful partners (often small-and medium sized companies) needs to be strengthened for them to continue to participate, focusing on activities that benefit these partners, such as lifelong learning.