National People's Congress Deputy Xia Li: Recommend aligning vocational college textbooks with industry technology to better match students' skills with enterprise needs

China Youth Daily · China Youth Network Reporter Jia Jiye

“You should first position the school as a company, with students as ‘products,’ and users as the company. Why do companies prefer to come to your school to recruit? Because your students’ skills match the needs of the enterprise. The core issue behind this is: the knowledge and skills taught at schools must also align with the latest demands of enterprises.”

This is a response from Xia Li, a National People’s Congress representative and senior skilled leader at China Electronics Technology Group Corporation Network Communication Research Institute, when answering a vocational college principal’s question about “the future direction of vocational colleges and how to cultivate talent.”

As a NPC delegate who has come from the front lines of enterprise production, Xia Li has always focused on the cultivation of skilled talents. He has noticed that almost all new employees recruited by companies cannot start work immediately and require 1 to 3 years of retraining. “This kind of vocational education is relatively a failure,” Xia Li said. In his view, the main reason for this situation is that most vocational colleges still teach according to outdated textbooks.

“Vocational college textbooks (mainly related to skill operation positions—note by the reporter) should be closely linked to actual factory operating procedures. The goal is to achieve a ‘seamless connection’ between talent training and job requirements.” However, Xia Li observed that the reality is still common where textbooks lag behind actual production.

On one hand, the speed of textbook updates is slower than technological innovation. Traditional paper textbooks have long publication cycles and are difficult to keep up with the frequent updates of operating procedures caused by equipment upgrades and process transformations in factories. On the other hand, textbook content tends to focus on theory and standard procedures, and some textbooks may emphasize principles and universal standards, but lack coverage of “practical experience” such as handling specific equipment or dealing with unexpected faults—these are precisely the key abilities of skilled workers. Meanwhile, teachers lacking long-term, in-depth frontline practice tend to focus more on theory, making it difficult to thoroughly explain the “why” behind operating procedures and how to adapt flexibly.

Xia Li believes that ideally, the connection between textbooks and operating procedures should be dynamic. The core is “teaching aligned with production output, lessons aligned with job movements.” Specifically, textbook content should directly derive from and guide operating procedures. The process of developing textbooks should ensure close cooperation between schools and enterprises, and the form and update mechanisms of textbooks should adapt to production changes.

For example, Hebei University of Technology’s “Modern Continuous Casting Production Technology” was co-created by teachers and national model workers and skilled artisans. It translates the latest technical standards and real operational cases from enterprises into teaching content, and has now become a “industry manual” for new employee onboarding training. “Modern vocational education textbooks, especially high-quality ones, should be directly based on real cases, the latest technical standards, and process procedures from frontline enterprises,” Xia Li said.

Focusing on strengthening the relevance of technical skills operation textbooks to actual factory practices, Xia Li proposed a suggestion at this year’s National Two Sessions regarding “synchronizing vocational college textbooks with industrial technology.”

He believes that the development of vocational college textbooks must adhere to deep integration between schools and enterprises, fully leverage the technical advantages of enterprise experts and high-skilled talents, involve them deeply in textbook review and editing, provide the latest cases, and establish dynamic update mechanisms (such as loose-leaf or digital resource libraries). In teaching implementation, an integrated “learning by doing, doing by learning” approach should be promoted. Classrooms should be transformed into “micro-factories,” with assessment methods shifting from exams to evaluating whether students can independently perform their jobs; in terms of faculty development, a two-way flow mechanism between school and enterprise personnel should be established, encouraging teachers to regularly practice in factories, and, when appropriate, hiring more “craftsman models” as part-time teachers.

“In summary, the ideal state of technical skills operation textbooks is to become a ‘living’ ‘work manual’ that connects the classroom and workshop. Although there are challenges of disconnection in reality, through continuous reform of industry-education integration, this connection will become closer and more effective,” Xia Li said.

(Edited by: Wen Jing)

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