(TL;DR) On 6 May 2026, the DC dVET kicked off its anniversary BarCamp webinar series with “Skills on the Move: How Migration Intersects with Dual VET”. Keynote speaker Helen Dempster (CGD Europe) argued that TVET investments and labour mobility pathways must be designed together from the start, not treated as separate tracks. A panel covered fair migration, transnational skills partnerships, company perspectives, and migration policy. Interactive BarCamp breakout sessions then unpacked five practitioner challenges: reading migration contexts correctly, keeping companies engaged when emigration is high, protecting workers through fair migration standards, unlocking cross-border qualification recognition, and building sustainable transnational skills partnerships. The overarching message: migration is no longer a side effect of skills investment but a strategic variable that, if managed well, can turn brain drain into a shared asset for sending and receiving countries alike.
On 6 May 2026, the Donor Committee for dual Vocational Education and Training (DC dVET) launched its anniversary BarCamp webinar series with a session that tackled one of the most urgent yet underexplored intersections in skills policy: how migration shapes, challenges, and ultimately can strengthen dual VET systems worldwide. Titled “Skills on the Move: How Migration Intersects with Dual VET”, the event brought together practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and development partners in an open, participatory format that blended an expert keynote, a structured panel discussion, and interactive BarCamp breakout sessions.
Why This Topic, Why Now
Migration and vocational training have long been treated as parallel tracks in development cooperation. Countries invest heavily in TVET to reduce youth unemployment and close skills gaps, yet billions of dollars spent over the past decade have largely failed to deliver lasting results. At the same time, high-income countries face persistent shortages of skilled workers in sectors ranging from healthcare to construction, while millions of trained workers in lower-income countries struggle to find employment commensurate with their qualifications. The DC dVET anniversary BarCamp series, which kicked off with this session, signals a deliberate shift: migration is no longer a side effect of skills investment but a central variable in how dual VET systems are designed, financed, and sustained.
The timing is also politically significant. Donor governments are under growing pressure to demonstrate that overseas development investments serve domestic interests. Linking TVET to structured labour mobility pathways offers a compelling “win-win” narrative: improving skills systems in partner countries while easing labour shortages at home. Helen Dempster’s CGD research, co-produced with IREX, frames this not as a compromise but as a strategic opportunity that donors have so far largely missed.
The Keynote: Linking Labour Mobility and Vocational Training
The session opened with an evidence-based keynote by Helen Dempster, Programme Co-Director for Migration and Displacement and Policy Fellow at CGD Europe, drawing on her flagship research programme “Skills on the Move: Linking Labour Mobility and Vocational Training”. Her central argument is straightforward but has significant implications for how development partners structure their portfolios: TVET investments and labour mobility pathways must be designed together from the outset, not bolted on to one another as afterthoughts.
Dempster’s research outlines three core questions that donors need to answer: why they should link labour mobility and TVET investments, how they can do so in practice, and where “investment-ready” TVET institutions already exist that could take advantage of these opportunities. Her answer to the first question rests on evidence that ad hoc training programmes for migration, designed for a single cohort or a single bilateral employer, cannot scale. Sustainable impact requires institutional harmonisation between public employment services, TVET providers, and employers, combined with detailed sector analysis and curriculum comparison between sending and receiving countries.
The keynote emphasised that increasing the mobility of skilled workers must be built on a foundation of existing, recognised TVET systems rather than parallel, project-specific training structures. The goal is to use TVET institutions as durable platforms for mobility: structures that can identify skills gaps, design adaptation pathways, and ensure graduates are genuinely employable in destination labour markets, not merely holders of certificates that go unrecognised abroad.
The Panel: Four Complementary Perspectives
The panel discussion brought together four distinct viewpoints that together captured the full complexity of the migration-VET nexus: fair migration, transnational skills partnerships, company experience, and migration policy. This breadth was deliberate. Migration intersects with dual VET at multiple levels simultaneously, and no single perspective is sufficient to navigate the policy and programmatic terrain.
From a fair migration standpoint, the discussion underscored that labour mobility can empower workers or exploit them, depending on the governance structures in place. Recruitment costs, contract substitution, and the withholding of documents remain live risks in many migration corridors, and any skills partnership that facilitates migration must be accompanied by robust protections for workers. Dual VET’s emphasis on formal, employer-linked training structures offers a partial safeguard, since graduates entering mobility pathways through recognised institutions are less likely to be channelled through informal and exploitative recruitment chains.
The transnational skills partnership perspective highlighted practical frameworks already being tested in the field. One example discussed, the GSP Soin initiative linking Moroccan and Belgian institutions, illustrated what structured bilateral collaboration looks like: direct institutional engagement to identify skills gaps, design adaptation pathways, and align curricula, rather than isolated training initiatives. The key lesson is that sustainability requires agreement at the institutional level, not just at the level of individual project staff or bilateral agreements between employers.
Company experiences brought the discussion to ground level. Employers in high-emigration contexts face a specific and often demoralising challenge: they invest in apprenticeship training and watch their best graduates leave. Yet the evidence from the DC dVET’s regional work, including insights from the Western Balkans, suggests this is not necessarily a reason for companies to disengage from dual VET. Firms that maintain strong training cultures often attract workers who return with new skills and networks, and they benefit from a reputational premium in local labour markets. Building trust with private actors takes time, but the returns can outweigh the costs by a factor of three.
BarCamp Breakouts: Practitioner Exchange on Five Core Themes
The interactive BarCamp format gave participants the space to move beyond polished presentations into messy, productive dialogue. Five themes structured the breakout sessions: understanding migration contexts, engaging companies in high-emigration environments, ensuring fair migration practices, skill recognition, and transnational skills partnerships. Each theme surfaced distinct challenges that merit sustained attention.
Understanding migration contexts is a prerequisite that is often skipped. Development projects frequently design VET interventions without a granular picture of migration patterns in the target region, including who migrates, where they go, in which sectors they find work, and under what conditions. Without this baseline, skills curricula can be mismatched to actual labour market destinations, and the prospect of mobility cannot be used as a genuine incentive to attract trainees or company partners. Practitioners in the breakout sessions noted the value of migration-sensitive labour market analyses as a starting point for any VET programme operating in a high-emigration context.
Engaging companies in high-emigration environments requires a different set of arguments than those used in more stable labour markets. Standard cost-benefit logic, which assumes that trained apprentices will stay and contribute productivity gains over time, breaks down when emigration rates are high. The sessions surfaced a reframing: companies should be helped to see their role in a transnational workforce ecosystem, where training well-qualified workers serves a reputational and supply-chain function even when those workers eventually move abroad. Some companies in the Balkans have found that alumni networks among emigrated former apprentices generate business contacts and referrals, turning brain drain into a form of diaspora capital.
Skill Recognition: The Missing Link
If there is one issue that threads through every dimension of the migration-VET intersection, it is the recognition of qualifications across borders. Skills recognition emerged as one of the most critical structural barriers discussed in the BarCamp sessions. A graduate from a dual VET programme in Morocco, Kosovo, or the Philippines may be highly skilled and job-ready, but without a formal equivalency process in the destination country, their qualification may be worth little in the eyes of employers.
This is not a new problem, but it has become more acute as the pace of migration accelerates and as donors increasingly promote labour mobility as a development tool. The lack of mutually recognised qualification frameworks creates a two-tier system: workers who can afford to navigate lengthy and costly recognition processes, and those who cannot, often ending up in jobs below their skill level. Dual VET’s structured, competency-based design is actually well suited to skills recognition processes, since the documented training content and assessed competencies provide a clear basis for comparison. But this potential can only be realised if recognition frameworks are built into bilateral or regional skills partnership agreements from the start.
Transnational Skills Partnerships: Potential and Preconditions
The BarCamp discussions repeatedly returned to transnational skills partnerships (TSPs) as the most promising structural response to the migration-VET challenge. TSPs, as developed under frameworks supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and others, aim to create mutually beneficial agreements in which partner countries train workers to specific standards that are recognised and valued in destination countries, in exchange for structured migration pathways, remittances, and knowledge transfer.
The preconditions for successful TSPs are demanding. They require institutional capacity in the sending country’s TVET system, employer engagement in the destination country, agreement on qualification standards, and migration policy infrastructure that creates legal, orderly channels for skilled workers. Where these conditions are met, TSPs can offer a genuine alternative to the chaotic, often exploitative informal migration pathways that currently dominate many corridors. But scaling them requires sustained political will on both sides, and they must be designed with explicit protections against the risk of brain drain stripping sending communities of the very skills they have invested in developing.
Implications for Development Cooperation Practice
The BarCamp webinar did not resolve the tensions inherent in the migration-VET nexus, nor did it try to. What it did was surface a set of design principles that should inform how development cooperation actors approach the intersection going forward. Context specificity matters: high-emigration environments require different programme architectures than those where labour mobility is limited. Company engagement strategies must be adapted to acknowledge emigration dynamics honestly rather than treating them as a threat to be minimised. Fair migration is not a safeguard to be added at the end of a project design but a foundational principle that shapes how partnerships, training curricula, and mobility pathways are structured.
The DC dVET’s decision to anchor its anniversary BarCamp series with this topic reflects a broader maturation of the field. After years of treating TVET primarily as a tool for domestic employment creation, the community of practice is increasingly ready to grapple with the global mobility of skills as an asset rather than a risk. Helen Dempster’s CGD research and the practitioner insights gathered in the breakout sessions together make a compelling case that the field has the tools and the evidence to do this well. The question now is whether donor programmes, partner country governments, and private sector actors can align their incentives and institutional frameworks to make it happen at scale.
For those who were unable to attend, the full recording of the webinar is available on YouTube, and the DC dVET webinar archive provides access to documentation from the broader BarCamp series and related events: https://www.dcdualvet.org
Views expressed are those of the author. Text and image were supported by AI.