GIZ: Building autonomy in 40 Ukrainian vocational institutions

Our client was GIZ, through its Skills4Recovery programme. The first phase of the work took 40 vocational education and training institutions from across Ukraine through a national autonomy programme, with the Ministry of Education and Science as final beneficiary.

Ukraine will need between three and four and a half million new skilled workers by 2032 to rebuild its economy. Only about 20% of school leavers choose vocational education, against 60–70% across the EU. Some 600 vocational institutions could close that gap, but the system was built for central control – funding, equipment and curricula all decided elsewhere, and weak links to the employers whose workforce they exist to supply.

Key challenges:

• Reform and the new Law on Vocational Education opened a route to autonomy, but institutions had no instruments for taking it
• Autonomy is four different things at once – managerial, financial, pedagogical and partnership – and institutions were unevenly ready across them
• Curricula and equipment lagged the labour market they were meant to serve
• Anything built for 40 institutions had to be usable by the other 560

1. Phase I: Research and diagnosis. We ran a fundamental study of the state of autonomy in Ukraine’s vocational institutions and surveyed the needs of the 40 participating providers, publishing the analytical report in Ukrainian and English so that the baseline was available beyond the programme.

    

2. Phase II: Training. Thirteen online sessions covered five thematic strands of autonomy, from the institution’s own business model to fundraising and communications. Participants rated the programme 4.8 out of 5 for usefulness.

    

3. Phase III: Mentoring and consolidation. Twenty-three institutions pitched their own institutional autonomy projects and received individual support – 14 mentors selected through an open competition, roughly six sessions each. The phase closed with a national forum, a public online course, an Autonomy Navigator and Roadmap, and documented success stories.

Forty institutions completed the autonomy programme against a plan of 25, and rated it 4.8 out of 5. Twenty-three of them left with concrete institutional projects already under way: development strategies updated to 2030, supervisory boards, applications to establish qualification centres, curricula modernised for new markets including electric vehicles, energy audits and a renewable energy hub. The closing national forum drew 664 participants.

The programme left instruments behind rather than participants. The training is now a public online course on ProfosvitaOnline – twelve video modules open to any vocational institution in Ukraine – and the final forum is published in full. The Autonomy Roadmap and self-assessment tool are being agreed with the Ministry of Education and Science, which would place them inside the national framework rather than alongside it.

The institutions themselves report that they can now update educational programmes independently, work with professional standards and plan strategically with business. An unplanned effect proved as durable: institutions began cooperating directly with each other, without the programme as intermediary.

• A mentor is what turns a published procedure into a submitted application. The documents for establishing a qualification centre are public. The institutions that succeeded said the published documents were not enough on their own – the decisive part was the nuance that is not written down anywhere, which is what fourteen mentors and six sessions each were actually for.
• Autonomy shows up first as horizontal cooperation. Nobody designed for institutions to start working with one another, but that is what happened once they stopped waiting for instructions from above. It is the clearest available proxy for whether an autonomy programme worked – and worth building in deliberately next time rather than noticing afterwards.