Vocational education and guiding young people towards choosing it as the most feasible alternative for them to integrate into the labour market and lead a successful career remains one of the government’s top priorities in the area of education. One of the measures launched in this respect is to allow high school first year students to easily transfer to vocational education schools via the web-based platform e-Albania within December.

Prime Minister Edi Rama today attended a meeting with the principals of vocational education schools, regional officials of the pre-university education system, as well as the heads of regional education offices, an event as part of the meetings in gymnasiums, vocational education schools with business representatives, parents and students in a bid to promote vocational education in the country.

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Thank you very much for attending and I would like to particularly thank those travelling from other cities and regions across the country to attend the meeting.

The reason why we are holding this meeting today is a very important one and I think it is a sufficient reason to invite you to attend, because it is not about an easy reform, but a very complex one, as well as literally a crucial and vital reform when it comes to the country’s economic and social development.

Obviously, there are many reasons why vocational education still fails to attract sufficient attention from parents and students, but, on the other hand, it is equally clear that at this stage of the country’s development, we have to embark on a shared effort to jointly overcome the obstacles we face due to those reasons.

I am not going to elaborate on the reasons why the current situation regarding the vocational education is not the one we would have all wished for so that it could meet the country’s needs, but what matters most is that everyone realizes that we can now afford tackling this situation more aggressively due to the fact that we have invested reasonably, although a lot more is needed to be done. However, if we can now encourage and push students to enrol in the vocational education system in significant numbers, we can do so without being worried that they may go to vocational education schools, but they would be denied decent education because of the conditions.

This is because the conditions have improved significantly.

I already noted, the vocational education infrastructure needs to expand further. However we can provide sufficient infrastructure for an initial stage, already underway.

If the country’s vocational education system has currently 4000 vacancies, we should attract and register 4000 students in this system. The labour market needs are definitely much higher, but we can’t ask you to push for more so that more students enrol in the vocational education system. We can’t currently do so, because we should build the required infrastructure in place. With the current infrastructure in place we can offer only 4000 vacancies.

This certainly calls for quick and systematic engagement, but it also requires full integration and cooperation between the regional education offices and the vocational education schools.

All these schools should work as a single system. We need to break up from the routine path we have been treading upon to date and a new trail needs to open. To this end, whole staff should be mobilized and best structured so that we move forward much faster towards our target and we should deliver by any means, because we can’t afford waiting four or more years, because the labour market is on the verge of languishing.

Hotel managers in Albania no longer ask a jobseeker what would be his or her desired monthly wage, but instead they ask applicants whether they would take up the job or not, because salary is the least important part, as the number of the young people willing to work is a very low one. Therefore, managers are ready to pay them a lot more, but surely they want to hire skilled workers and such skills can be earned and honed in the vocational education system. We can successfully deliver by combining the two.

This is all I had to share with you.