National People's Congress Deputy Xia Li: Recommend that vocational college textbooks keep pace with industry technology to better align students' skills with enterprise needs

China Youth Daily · China Youth Network Reporter Jia Jiya

“First, position the school as a business, and the students as ‘products’; the users are the businesses. The reason businesses like coming to your school to recruit is that your students match the needs of the companies. The core issue behind this is: the knowledge and skills taught at schools must also align with the latest demands of businesses.”

This was the response given by Xia Li, a national representative and a senior skills leader at China Electronics Technology Group Corporation’s Network Communication Research Institute, to a vocational school principal’s question about “how vocational schools should move forward and cultivate talent” during the National People’s Congress.

As a national representative who has come from the production front lines of companies, Xia Li has always focused his duties on the cultivation of skilled talent. He noted that the employees recruited by businesses nowadays can hardly start working directly and require 1 to 3 years of retraining. “Such vocational education is relatively a failure,” said Xia Li. In his view, the fact that most vocational schools still teach using outdated textbooks is an important reason for this situation.

“The textbooks of vocational schools (mainly related to skill operation positions—reporter’s note) should be closely related to the actual operating procedures in factories, with the aim of achieving a ‘seamless connection’ between talent cultivation and job requirements.” However, Xia Li observed that in reality, the lag of vocational school textbooks behind actual production is still a common issue.

On one hand, the speed of textbook updates is slower than technological innovation; the publishing cycle of traditional printed textbooks is long, making it difficult to keep up with the frequently updated operating procedures due to equipment upgrades and process improvements in factories. On the other hand, textbook content tends to emphasize theory and standard processes, especially some textbooks may focus on principles and general standards, lacking coverage of “practical experience” for specific equipment and non-standard handling of unexpected failures, which are key abilities for skilled workers. At the same time, if teachers lack long-term and in-depth practice on the front lines, teaching can easily lean towards theory, making it difficult to thoroughly explain the “why” behind operational procedures and “flexibility in response.”

Xia Li believes that ideally, the relationship between textbooks and operating procedures is dynamically developed, with the core idea being “teaching follows production, courses follow job movements.” Specifically, the content of textbooks should directly derive from and guide operating procedures; during the textbook development process, schools and enterprises must ensure close alignment, and the forms and updating mechanisms of textbooks should also adapt to changes in production.

For example, the “Modern Continuous Casting Production Technology” textbook from Hebei University of Technology was co-authored by teachers and national model workers and technical experts, transforming the cutting-edge technical standards and real operating cases from enterprises into teaching content, and has now become an “industry handbook” for the onboarding training of new employees. “Modern vocational education textbooks, especially high-quality ones, should have content that directly originates from real cases, the latest technical standards, and process regulations from the front lines of enterprises,” said Xia Li.

Focusing on enhancing the relevance of technical skill operation textbooks with factory realities, Xia Li proposed recommendations this year’s National Two Sessions around “synchronizing vocational school textbooks with industry technology.”

He believes that the development of textbook content in vocational schools must adhere to deep integration between schools and enterprises, fully leveraging the technical advantages of corporate experts and highly skilled talents, allowing them to participate deeply in textbook compilation and review, provide the latest cases, and establish a dynamic updating mechanism (such as loose-leaf style, digital resource library). In terms of teaching implementation, an integrated teaching model of “learning by doing, doing while learning” should be promoted. Transform the classroom into a “mini factory,” shifting assessment methods from written tests to evaluating “the ability to independently hold a position”; in terms of faculty development, establish a mutual flow mechanism for personnel between schools and enterprises, encouraging teachers to regularly practice in factories, and, within compliance, hire more “craftsman model workers” as part-time teachers.

“In summary, the ideal state of technical skill operation textbooks is to become a ‘living’ ‘manual’ that connects the classroom with the workshop. Although there are challenges of disconnection in reality, through continuous reforms of the integration of production and education, this connection will become increasingly close and effective,” said Xia Li.

(Edited by Wen Jing)

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