What Skills Training Do Cambodian Garment Workers Need? - Chea Vatana, You Saokeo Khantey and Song Sopheak

Given that the garment and textiles sector is an important driver in the Cambodian economy, considerable attention should be paid to reinvigorate the technical and vocational education and training relating to garments and textiles, starting from encouraging workers to participate in the skills training programmes. [...] Thus, to encourage more workers to participate in skills training, the authors propose the following measures that concentrate on two diff erent areas: Training to increase productivity: The fi rst thing to do is to identify specifi c industrial training needs, which ought to be diff erent from the content of the existing training provided by the fi rms. [...] For example, the Federal Pell Grants and Perkins Loans in the US (Carneiro and Heckman 2002) and the Train to Gain in the UK (Carneiro, Dearden and Vignoles 2010) both of which provide fi nancial support for vulnerable students and workers, were unsuccessful from the beginning due to a lack of applicants. [...] The origin of the skills gaps in Cambodia can be linked to the country’s recent past and the destruction of the education system by the KR regime. [...] It is worth noting that the graph presents only the number of participants enrolled in both private (solely for the academic year 2018-2019 in which the data was collected) and public institutions registered at the Ministry of Labour and Vocational Training (MLVT) regardless of the duration of the training which can range anywhere from a few days to less than a year.