International Vocational Qualifications are the Missing Link in Global Workforce Mobility

Labour markets are becoming increasingly global. Yet employers often struggle to understand and trust the skills that a potential migrant has. At best, this leads to under-employment; at worst it prevents people moving at all. Fixing this issue—making it easier for someone trained in one country to work in others—is therefore key to realising the benefits from mobility.

International hiring incurs significant costs and risks

Bringing a new hire up to speed is expensive, even when they are already skilled. Aepli et al. (2024) break down the costs involved in hiring a new recruit: “search” (finding a worker); “adaptation” (lost productivity due to the need for up-skilling, retraining, and integration); and “disruption” (lost productivity of incumbent workers to support integration). In Switzerland, “adaptation” costs were almost €10,000 (US$11,600), amounting to 60 percent of total costs (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The costs involved in hiring a new recruit in Switzerland and Germany

Source: Aepli et al. (2024)

These figures show the costs incurred by employers, but perhaps more significant is the risk associated with hiring someone who trained in a context unfamiliar to the employer. PMB (a recruitment firm in the UK) looked into the cost of a “bad hire”—an employee who fails to meet performance expectations, disrupts team dynamics, or leaves the organisation within a short period. Their figures show the cost of a “bad hire” is twice the base annual salary for both mid- and senior-level roles.

A rational employer will therefore favour apprenticeships and in-house hiring—where they have direct visibility into the training process—and be slow to trust the skills of someone trained in another country. This is fine when recruitment needs can be met close to home, but this is not the reality for most employers, especially those in high-income countries where demographics are against them. A recent IMF study estimates that two thirds of the new jobs in the European Union (EU) are filled by people from outside the EU.

Large multinational companies can reduce risks or simply accept them; they often have insight into the labour markets of other countries in which they operate, and they can afford retraining where necessary. However, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can’t afford these risks and seldom have this visibility. Both need to contend with the fact that the demand for labour at technician level is rapidly growing, where the scale of training is measured in hundreds of hours; even multinationals may balk at the risk of re-training at this scale.

National systems often work against international qualifications

Introducing internationally recognized vocational qualifications can help mitigate against these costs and risks. Good international qualifications allow employers to find and integrate skilled workers regardless of where they were trained, reducing both “search” and “adaptation” costs, and broader risks.

However, two decades of investment into national technical and vocational education and training (TVET) has driven national agendas at the expense of internationally recognized qualifications. UNESCO-UNEVOC (2026) details the extraordinary growth in the number of countries with a National Qualification Framework (NQF) (Figure 2). NQFs allow qualifications to be registered using standardised rules on size and level, theoretically creating an approach that can be understood nationally.

Figure 2. Number of countries with a National Qualifications Framework (NQF)

Source: UNESCO-UNEVOC (2026)

While NQFs may have helped the efficiency of national labour markets, differences between them can create inefficiencies across borders. For example, some NQFs standardize national qualifications across the entire training infrastructure, while others act more as a register of qualifications, each of which is unique to the training institution that built them.

These differences can mean that international qualification owners, or “awarding bodies” find their operations becoming fragmented. City & Guilds (a UK-based vocational awarding body) once delivered standard qualifications widely across Commonwealth technical education systems, but their prominence has declined as countries have prioritised domestic qualifications.

The inefficiencies are reflected in the systems built to mange them. Mutual Recognition Agreements (MRAs); regional qualification frameworks (such as the European Qualifications Framework, or EQF); and qualification “translation” services such as the European Network of Information Centres (ENIC) all use NQFs as their starting point. They are expensive and technically difficult to set up and implement; and often impose costs on individual migrants. For example, in the UK, individuals need to buy a Statement of Comparability, showing how a foreign qualification that they hold relates to the UK system.

These costs would be acceptable if the systems they funded worked well for employers and job-seekers who use vocational qualifications to signal and understand competence. However, these systems tend to focus on the level and size of qualifications, rarely on the workplace competencies which are most important to employers. As Figure 3 shows, employers clearly feel they are not being well-served by these responses.

Figure 3. Challenges international employers face in implementing skills-based hiring

Source: McKinsey & Co (2022)
Note: n=276, survey conducted between September and October 2021 across several US states

Industry-derived international qualification models already function

The good news is that a range of genuinely international awarding bodies have emerged, each with their own approach to developing qualifications that then become international. Qualifications linked to proprietary technologies (such as the qualifications offered by Microsoft or Cisco) have survived national agendas, as have qualifications where there is a high degree of international agreement on technique (such as those for accounting technicians).

The conditions that allowed these qualifications to thrive—working within a universally accepted range of technologies and techniques—are now becoming true of more areas. In renewable energy: the Global Wind Organisation (an association of leading wind turbine manufacturers) is offering certificates in subjects such as working at heights. In construction, buildingSMART International is developing certification in building information modelling, where common data standards allow skills to be defined and recognised across employers and countries.

Personal certification organisations are also working with industry to translate universal workplace competencies into formal qualifications, and to ensure the recognition necessary to enable trainee mobility. CompTIA is a good example, offering vendor-agnostic qualifications in ICT. There is also a coalition of UK-based awarding bodies which was recently formed for exactly this purpose. Interestingly, NQFs which include policies for recognising foreign qualifications do have something to offer here, but only where there are the resources to implement policy.

These models make qualifications easy to recognise across countries without the need for complicated and costly government-to-government agreements, making labour mobility and skills recognition easier and more impactful. For example, Helvetas’ “Safer Migration Programme” (SaMi) in Nepal piloted an international scaffolder certification; ~85 percent of graduates have been able to secure foreign employment in the same occupation, with the international certification lowering migration costs and increasing monthly incomes.[1]

Policy choices can scale the availability of international qualifications

In an ideal world, international awarding bodies would support global hiring with qualifications that make occupational competence clear to employers across borders. This improved clarity doesn’t just make people more mobile, it also makes it less likely that they will be under-employed. Where international qualifications are adopted into a country’s formal TVET systems, investments into recognising informal learning can be pegged to international standards, making their value apparent to international labour markets.

Policymakers, and the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and donors that support them, can make this happen now:

1. National TVET regulators should build simple, usable, routes to align foreign qualifications in priority destination markets to national frameworks. These routes need to exist in more than just policy, they also need to be made a reality through investment into operations that make them fast, clear, and accessible to international awarding bodies.
2. National TVET funding bodies should set the rules by which foreign qualifications can be eligible for public funding, making it less likely that public money will be spent on qualifications that restrict global labour mobility.
3. Donors and NGOs should ensure that, where TVET is a part of their work, training can be mapped to international qualifications, especially within professions with global demand (such as green skills and healthcare).

If labour markets are global, qualifications must be too. Until they are, mobility will remain slower, riskier, and less productive than it should be.

If you are interested in discussing these concepts in more detail, please join CGD’s Community of Practice focused on linking training and migration for the green transition. The next meeting will be held on May 27th 2026 and will focus on internationally recognized qualifications in green sectors. To register your interest in joining the community of practice, please enter your details here.

[1] These figures are drawn from an internal Helvetas study, “Employment Status of SaMi’s Skill Training Graduates and Graduates of International Certification in Nepal and Abroad”.