Skill Matters: Curriculum updates and Labor Market Outcomes

Trends like digitalization and the energy transition are major drivers of changes in the skill demands in the labor market. Ideally, education institutions should anticipate the labor market requirements for skills and provide students with appropriate skill sets. Vocational Education Training (VET) plays a crucial role in training students for practical roles and preparing them for these changes. This study targets Dutch middleskilled VET graduates and investigates the labor market consequences of curriculum updates. From text descriptions of the curricula, we construct a measurement for the skills and identify the emerging patterns of skill supply in the Netherlands, differentiated by education programs. Adopting Staggered Difference in Difference and combining the skill indices with graduates’ survey and administrative microdata, we find that the updates mitigate the self-reported skill mismatches and positively correlate with the probability of employment and self-reported wages. This research sheds light on the contents and frequency of the curriculum updates in the Netherlands.