A study of t echnical and vocational education impact on productivity of hand-woven carpet industry

  The importance of t echnical and vocational education in enabling people to gain access to employment and participate in the society through economic activity is clear. A well designed and well delivered technology education curriculum can enhance future workforce productivity, because it reinforces what students have learned in other curricular areas, is ideal for enhancing cognitive process abilities, and promotes active involvement with technology. The future competitiveness of Iranian hand-woven carpet depends on access to up-to-date and productive technologies, optimization structure, and the management skills of carpet weavers. This project seeks to quantify one of these competitiveness factors, namely, the relative efficiency of individual technical and vocational carpet weavers compared to traditional weavers and the best practice in the industry. The data used for empirical analysis was collected from 339 weavers and other relevant data from 2002 survey. The results showed that weavers who had participated in technical and vocational education programmes were less efficient than traditional weavers.