A Comparison across Emerging Economies

As production processes become increasingly complex, multinational companies in the manufacturing sector are in increasing need of skilled workers at their production sites. Especially in emerging economies, German direct investors face challenges in finding appropriately skilled workers with the right technical knowledge, experience-based capabilities and problem-solving skills. Therefore, both German global players and ‘smaller’ transnational companies carry out vocational education and training activities at their locations around the world. How they develop these activities depends both on the strategies adopted by headquarters in Germany and on the significant influence exerted by local conditions.

In order to explain the various forms of local vocational education and training activities of German multinational companies in three different local contexts, this research project focuses on German companies in the industrial belt from Guadalajara to Puebla in Mexico, in the metropolitan areas of Shanghai in China, and in Bangalore in India. In addition, the perspectives of headquarters in Germany are taken into account in order to gain a full picture. In particular, the project considers the extent to which headquarters implements centralised training strategies or whether subsidiaries implement local forms of vocational education and training activities. We ask whether uniform solutions, diverse variants or hybrid solutions can be identified. In addition, we focus on the way in which multinational companies develop local arrangements for training activities in their subsidiaries and try to understand whether, and how, these companies transfer parts of the German dual system – with which they are familiar – to their different subsidiaries.

To address these issues, the research project systematically combines perspectives from the discipline of economic geography with those from economics and business education. The selected regions are analysed comparatively applying a qualitative methodology.

Project Description: Details

Multinational companies in three different skill formation systems