Assessing the potential influence of Vocational Education and Training (VET) courses on creating job opportunities and nurturing work skills has been considered challenging due to the ambiguity in defining their complex relationships and connections with the local economy. Here, we quantify the potential influence of VET courses and explain it with future economy and specialization by constructing a network of more than 17,000 courses, jobs, and skills in Singapore's SkillsFuture data based on their text similarities captured by a text embedding technique, Sentence Transformer. We find that VET courses associated with Singapore's 4th Industrial Revolution economy demonstrate higher influence than those related to other future economies. The course influence varies greatly across different sectors, attributed to the level of specificity of the skills covered. Lastly, we show a notable concentration of VET supply in certain occupation sectors requiring general skills, underscoring a disproportionate distribution of education supply for the labor market.

翻译：评估职业教育培训课程在创造就业机会与培养工作技能方面的潜在影响力，因其与本地经济间复杂关系及关联的界定模糊性，一直被视为具有挑战性的任务。本研究通过基于文本嵌入技术Sentence Transformer捕获的文本相似性，构建了新加坡SkillsFuture数据中超过17,000门课程、工作岗位与技能的网络，量化了职业教育培训课程的潜在影响力，并结合未来经济与专业化趋势进行解释。研究发现：与新加坡第四次工业革命经济相关的职业教育培训课程，相较于其他未来经济领域的课程表现出更高的影响力；课程影响力在不同行业间差异显著，这主要归因于所涵盖技能的专业化程度差异；最后，研究揭示了职业教育资源在需要通用技能的特定职业领域存在显著集聚现象，凸显了劳动力市场教育供给的不均衡分布。