july 15 marked World Youth Skills Day 2024, with the theme "Youth Skills for Peace and Development", once again continuing to emphasise equipping young people with vocational skills and opportunities to help them proactively enter the labour market, establish and develop their careers, thereby contributing to a future of peace, prosperity and sustainable development.

In Vietnam, recent research results show that workers who receive vocational training and education have higher employability, income and job satisfaction than those who do not.

Currently, vocational education institutions have focused on fostering, evaluating, and developing vocational skills for young workers according to business needs, coordinating with businesses to recognise, recruit, use, and pay wages and salaries to students and graduates, based on skills and practice capacity.

It can be seen that workers with vocational training and education are better equipped to adapt to new digital technologies, their employability and competitiveness are improved, and they can cope with the economic challenges caused by the pandemic and are more likely to maintain employment than those without training.

Many international organisations also believe that workers' vocational skills will be the "new international currency" in the future labour market because it brings better competitiveness capacity and labour productivity.

According to the Vocational Education Development Strategy for the 2021-2030 period, with a vision to 2045, the goal to strive for by 2030, will be to focus on improving the quality and effectiveness of vocational education, to meet the country's needs for human resources with vocational skills, proactively participating in the international human resource training market, and contributing to increasing the rate of trained workers with degrees and certificates to 35-40%.

It can be seen that vocational skills development activities for Vietnamese youth aim to rapidly develop vocational education to meet the diverse needs of the labour market, the people and the increasing requirements for the quantity, structure and quality of human resources with vocational skills for national development. It is considered one of the important tasks in developing vocational education.

In response to World Youth Skills Day 2024, the General Department of Vocational Education (Ministry of Labour, War Invalids and Social Affairs) has requested vocational education institutions and vocational skills assessment organisations to enhance communications, raise awareness of the meaning, role, and value of vocational education, develop professional skills for pupils and students in promoting creativity, associated with the implementation of equity and social progress, ensuring social security.

With that, vocational education institutions discover, praise and promptly reward organisations, individuals, communities, businesses and partners, that have made effective and practical contributions to training and developing vocational skills for young people.

Vocational education institutions need to focus on innovating training programmes and methods, linking vocational education with businesses and the labour market, strengthening the capacity of the evaluation and the national certification system for vocational skills, and innovating training methods according to an open, diverse and flexible education model associated with the national qualifications framework and the labour market.

It is also necessary to prioritise developing qualities, forming core skills, soft skills, digital skills, and foreign language proficiency for learners, develop plans for training, fostering, evaluating and developing vocational skills for young workers according to business needs, and coordinate with businesses to recognise, recruit, use, and pay wages and salaries to students and graduates based on skills and practice capacity.

In addition, relevant agencies also need to strengthen and expand international cooperation on vocational skills development for young people to have more resources and experience in building and implementing skills development policies and programmes that can approach international standards, to improve the quality of human resources and the mobility of youth human resources in the domestic and international labour market during the integration process.
According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), social security, as the protection that a society offers its individuals and households, should be known to all as it is a human, social and fundamental right to which all individuals are entitled, and one that guarantees adecent standard of living conditions (ILO, 2009).

Social security education leads to the creation of culture, an increased awareness of societal  rights and responsibilities, and of basic concepts, leading to greater trust in social security institutions.
Such education must also incorporate elements of financial literacy, particularly in countries that have brought about reforms offering greater autonomy and responsibility in the management of funds, with a view to simplifying the identification of suitable options.

Experiences of implementing education and culture-creation initiatives in the field of social security

Chile
Chile’s Mutual for Safety (Mutual de Seguridad – CChC) has developed specific initiatives aimed at creating a social security culture, both in the field of gender and for the development of critical risk prevention skills, using methodologies geared towards adult learning (CChC, 2020a). These are detailed in Table 2.

The development of critical risk prevention skills was based on a practical training strategy, through the establishment of a critical risk training centre. Its objective was to tackle risks including; falling from  heights, working with electricity, working in confined spaces, and operating machinery and vehicles, whilst reaching different groups of workers across the country.

Practical training seeks to recreate working conditions, containing exposure to the aforementioned critical risks. Two mobile units were introduced, adapted with cutting-edge equipment and technology to maximize the safety of both trainers and trainees during the experiential learning sessions. Each unit is large enough to carry two trainers and all the requisite materials.

The units visited 16 Chilean regions (travelling a total distance of 4,300 km) and trained some 4,000 people over the course of a year, with no incidents occurring during training.

In terms of training in workplace health and safety, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the digitalization of training processes, moving away from a face-to-face strategy towards an entirely online format. This  maintained training continuity for affiliated workers considering embarking on an activity with a critical risk.

A workplace health and safety learning cycle was put in place, incorporating new training methodologies and learning-related technologies. 

Costa Rica
In Costa Rica, several institutions have developed social security education initiatives. the Social Insurance Fund of Costa Rica (Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social – CCSS) organized a round table on pensions, disability benefits and death benefits. A decision was taken to include social security in public education programmes in order to foster an understanding of rights and responsibilities. In 2020, the organization also rolled out a children’s summer workshop entitled “Tito’s pension” (“La pensión de Tito”) to explain the importance of saving for a pension. he CCSS also implemented a health-care initiative, with pharmacies , which involved using QR codes as an innovative way of reaching different groups of patients. This was use to  promote therapeutic compliance, provide information on the correct use of medication and thus improving treatment adherence.
Mexico
The Mexican Social Security Institute (Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social – IMSS) developed an online education platform (CLIMSS) to provide health education to its beneficiaries and the general public (IMSS, 2020).

The platform was designed to disseminate knowledge that would improve the health of the population. On the basis that the greater a population’s health literacy, the better the health outcomes or health conditions, the challenge was to put into effect a package of training and health-promotion measures that made a positive impact on individual and collective quality of life.

The launch of this tool responded to the need to provide technical, practical, reliable, strategically selected and specialist information through a user-friendly and intuitive platform. Skills-based courses were devised, drawing on adult-learning principles and using gamification as a motivation and retention strategy.

The platform set out to achieve a target of one million registered users and attained five times this figure. As far as course quality is concerned, participants gave the COVID-19 courses a quality rating of 9.3 and the other options a 9.4 rating.
Dominican Republic
In the Dominican Republic, the Superintendence of Pensions (Superintendencia de Pensiones – SIPEN) drew up a road map to promote pension education through a series of projects and initiatives. The goal was to provide timely and accurate information about the Dominican Pension System (Sistema Dominicano de Pensiones – SDP) to various segments of society, to raise awareness of the rights and responsibilities of members and beneficiaries, and to promote the inclusion of issues related to social security in the national education system (SIPEN, 2020).
Uruguay
Uruguay’s Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS) developed a package of social security education initiatives as part of its institutional strategy to foster a culture of social security.

The BPS established that there was a need for a tailored approach to each target group. To this end, it rolled out initiatives at several levels: education programmes, general outreach campaigns, training of public officials, strengthening of governance, and interaction with society as a whole.

Fostering a citizens’ ability to exercise their rights was developed through providing knowledge, raising awareness of the responsibilities linked to these rights, encouraging a critical and participatory attitude, and developing a social understanding of the social security system.

The BPS has been working on formal and informal education initiatives since 2007. The strategy deployed in formal education is to include the topic in the curriculum at different levels. Over time, the materials have evolved and expanded, beginning with fourth-year courses (10-year-olds) and gradually filtering through to other year groups, eventually even reaching the early-years curriculum (4-year-olds). In the latter case, the focus was on concepts such as solidarity and the recognition of older people. Content was also developed for adults re-entering the education system.
Other countries’ experiences
In addition to the initiatives described above, other Latin American countries also have experience of promoting social security education and culture.

For several years, Argentina’s Social Security Secretariat, in partnership with UNICEF, rolled out its “Programme for a Culture of Social Security” (Programa para una Cultura de la Seguridad Social), which was principally based around a campaign aimed at children. This involved a travelling theatre company performing an interactive play entitled “Super Social Security Mission” (Súper Misión Seguridad Social) in schools and theatres around the country to highlight the importance of social security and the principles of equality and solidarity. Teaching materials were provided via a dedicated website to accompany the play (MTEySS, 2013).

In Colombia, the Ministries of Health and National Education and the Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar, a State body working to improve the wellbeing 

of families, collaborated on a project to foster a culture of occupational health in schools to raise awareness of this issue among pupils and their families.

Similarly, Paraguay rolled out an initiative to include Social Security as an option in its high-school curriculum. This initiative, which was supported by the country’s Social Insurance Institute (Instituto de Previsión Social – IPS), aimed to provide pupils with a basic knowledge of social security rights and responsibilities.
It is becoming increasingly important for citizens to know about social security and how it is relevant to them. It is vital for people to understand that social security can have a profound impact on all sectors of society. Thanks to the social security system, workers and their families can access medical care and gain protection against a loss of income, whether for short periods of unemployment, maternity or illness or for longer periods resulting from an accident at work or disability. They should also understand that social security is the reason why older people continue to receive an income, and why children and young people can benefit from specific programmes.

When we talk about fostering a “culture of social security”, this means making the general public aware of the values and principles that underpin such a culture, and making timely and accessible information tools available to all, regardless of age or economic situation.

The aim is for people to see, understand and feel their reality and, as a result, become aware of prevention and welfare issues. To this end, centres of education must be transformed into places of empowerment for students, teachers and other members of the education community, so that they all understand their rights and responsibilities and can therefore exercise their citizenship.

The ultimate goal is to  improve quality of life for current and future generations, facilitate the development of individuals to become more aware of their role  in ensuring their own safety and stability and their greater contribution to the society in which they live.