WHY SWEDISH MODEL OF PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION IS SUCCESSFUL

The current study is devoted to the peculiarities of the Swedish model of professional education, such as the importance of social partnership between government, business and educational institutions, the place of lifelong learning in this model, quality management of professional education programs in Sweden. The authors analyze the characteristics and mechanisms of the collaboration between Swedish system of education and the national labour market, consider institutions that are involved in predicting the needs of the labour market and special organizational aspects of the professional education programs in Sweden. The current study is devoted to the peculiarities of the Swedish model of professional education and the place of lifelong learning in this model. Authors cover institutions and government organizations that are involved in predicting the demand for professional skills, functions and responsibility of every organization and state initiatives in the sphere of professional education in Sweden. The paper emphasizes a close liaison between VET and labour market that is a customer and the driving force of the educational programs and professional training, as well as specific features of the system of predicting the needs of the labour market and demand for professional skills in Sweden. The authors analyze the Swedish experience in disseminating the results of the prediction and studying regional prediction concerning future skills. The authors reveal how professional training programs in Sweden is organized, how learning process is built, how up-to-date and practice-oriented learning plan for companies is elaborated, what is special about it, how facilities and resources are selected. Problem-based learning, individual and group project work, e-learning technologies, guest specialists and experts, on-the-job training, company visit are considered the most effective learning methods in Swedish system of professional lifelong learning. The paper covers the algorithms for selecting the teaching staff. The authors describe the mechanisms for informing the public about the employment perspectives considering the education that they can acquire in the educational institutions in Sweden. As an example, the authors consider the service “Occupational compass” that is supported by the Sweden employment bureau and that provides the information about the labour market and career perspectives for specialists on 200 professions for the next one, five and ten years. The special attention in the paper is paid to the quality management of VET in Sweden, it covers the mechanisms for assessment and monitoring of VET including evaluation of the learning process and student’s evaluation, assessment of learners’ success, and learning process evaluation by a supervisory board. The authors show the perspectives of spreading the Swedish model of professional education further.

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