Vocational Skill Competition, a Mechanism to Develop Technical and Vocational Training

Iran Technical and Vocational Training Organization (TVTO) arranges the National Skills Competition (NSC) annually aiming to boost youths’ self- efficacy, to generate creativity and innovation in technical and vocational training (TVT), and to provide suitable environment for fair competitions and entrepreneurship development, as well as TVTO discourages labor force, provides opportunity for youth in order to present their competency and expertise, develops a mechanism for updating national- level skills on the international ones, and prepare an enabling environment to interact between labor force and real world of work through the competition. Introducing NSC and World Skills Competition (WSC), the paper examined the evolution of vocational skills competition as a significant instrument for developing TVT and describes the benefits and criticisms addressed to the competition. This is a review and applied- type paper. The reliable and valid data of Iran NSC Office and WSC Secretariat were used. The analysis results and authors’ experiences show that the role of competitions in developing and promoting TVT cannot be ignored. At the end, some recommendations have been proposed for continuous improvement of competitions based on the results.