Skills that connect the world

The World Vocational and Technical Education Development Conference 2026, which concluded in Tianjin on Oct 17, arrived at a time when the global economy urgently needs what vocational education provides: practical skills, decent jobs and the human capacity to turn technological change into shared progress. With senior officials, ministers and representatives of educational institutions and industries from many countries across Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe and the Americas attending, the conference was one of the most broadly representative global gatherings devoted to vocational skills in years.

One of its central achievements — the release of the Framework of World Vocational and Technical Education Standards, known as the Beijing Agreement — marked a historic step. For the first time, the world's major vocational education systems have a common reference point for teaching, training and assessment. The framework, endorsed by 45 countries, is a public good, built together and open to all.

The trajectory matters as much as the text. In 2022, the first such conference produced the Tianjin Initiative; in 2024 it led to the Tianjin Consensus; in 2026, it set the standards. Dialogue has become joint action, and joint action has become shared rules. This is how international cooperation is supposed to work — through patience, inclusiveness and consensus rather than dictates.

China's role in this process rests on demonstrated capability, not rhetoric. According to the white paper released at the conference, China now runs more than 10,000 vocational institutions serving over 30 million students, with programs covering all 41 industrial categories of its economy. Vocational schools supply nearly 10 million skilled workers annually, accouningt for more than 70 percent of new frontline employees in modern manufacturing and strategic emerging industries, and each year bring the first college credential to some 3 million families.

More telling still is what happens beyond China's borders. The Luban Workshop, China's flagship vocational education cooperation project, celebrated its 10th anniversary at the conference. Since the first Luban Workshop opened in Thailand in 2016, 38 workshops have taken root in 32 countries, working with over 100 enterprises and training more than 160,000 people in over 100 majors. Four national standards about the Luban Workshop unveiled in Tianjin — covering construction, equipment, pedagogy and quality assessment — show a determination that this cooperation be governed by quality, not merely goodwill.

The conference also pointed to the future. Students at the closing ceremony reconfigured a production line for 800 new energy vehicle motors within 72 hours in an artificial intelligence-enhanced "future training center", a model to be extended to 20 fields. The accompanying World Vocational College Skills Competition drew 36,000 contestants from 78 countries. Regional sessions of the conference in Tianjin also yielded concrete outcomes, from railway skills cooperation with Nigeria to a new energy vehicle industry-education alliance among Shanghai Cooperation Organization members.

In his opening address to the conference, Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang offered four suggestions: jointly building standards to lead open cooperation, promoting transformation and upgrading through innovation, advancing equity and inclusiveness for people's all-round development, and strengthening friendly ties through mutual learning.

At the plenary session, Huai Jinpeng, minister of education, called for making vocational education a bridge for people-to-people connectivity and mutual learning among different civilizations, and for building a diversified, coordinated and rapidly responsive skills training system.

Together, these are not abstractions. They reflect a conviction that in an era of rapid technological disruption and widening development gaps, skills are the most practical form of international public goods — more durable and more inclusive.

From the Tianjin Initiative to the Beijing Agreement, and from a single workshop in Thailand to 38 across four continents, institutions are being built and young people from Nairobi to Tashkent are gaining the means to change their lives. Vocational education is diplomacy with immediate, visible returns: Every trained electrician, welder, nurse and engineer is a living argument for cooperation.

What was launched in Tianjin is more than a conference's legacy; it is a foundation on which future generations will stand. For that, the Tianjin conference will be remembered not for the documents it produced, but for the opportunities it unlocked.

The author is anassociate research fellow at Beijing Foreign Studies University.The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.