Bangladesh has been rapidly growing economically from 2003 and overseas employment has been also expected to increase from 600,000 to 1.2 million in 2025. Investment, however, has been the most vital factor to capitalize demographic dividend in relevant and good quality education with sustained efforts in skilling and up-skilling of the labour force, as well as gradually shifting to higher value-added manufacturing and service skills. Due to fragmentation, low quality, low market-orientation and access barriers, the formal TVET system has been in very low demand.

Job placement of graduates has been less than 40%. ILO's research and policy guidance strive to improve the quality of overall TVET system. Key project partners include Technical and Madrasa Education Division (TMED) of Ministry of Education, Directorate of Technical Education (DTE), Bangladesh Technical Education Board (BTEB), National Skills Development Council (NSDC) and Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET), the departments under these ministries, organization of employers, ISCs, trade unions, employers in five selected sectors, and NGOs involved in skills trainings. The B-SEP project has expanded the availability of new NTVQF courses in the target industry sectors, and supported adoption of new quality assurance guidelines among targeted TVET institutions.

As the project has almost reached the completion stage, a tracer study has done to understand the relevance and effectiveness of the project intervention. Tracer Studies refer to the studies where data is collected and analysed over time to track changes following an intervention.

This study looks at the project's pilot initiative of employment outcomes of TVET graduates, trained apprentices, and micro- has been to assess the employment outcomes, and to assess whether the skills and enterprise development training provided relevant, adequate, need-based and productive training for employers and the entrepreneurs, and if the skills and enterprise development training proved relevant, adequate, need-based, and productive for employers and the market. Moreover, the field delivery of the B-SEP Project has been pilot-based and it's the nature of action research.

The findings of the study can be helpful to reconsideration on effective decision making, and benefit other similar projects with better design plan. The primary objective of this study market. ARCED Foundation provided an array of services specifically focused on data collection and analysis. A rigorous desk review has been included reviews of relevant literature and document. Also mixed method technique with both quantitative and qualitative approach have been used at this study where 2,189 graduates from 47 districts have taken as sample. Extensive desk review of online and offline sources has done for understanding the whole project more coherently.

As a part of qualitative study, six focus group discussion (FGDs), twenty in-depth interviews (IDs), and seven key informant interviews (KIIs) has been used with a pretested semi-structured graduate/beneficiaries' questionnaire. Following the interviews ARCED has ensured the data quality through the SurveyCTO platform. The team at ARCED has further delivered a summary report to ILO where B-SEP Project findings has clearly suggested that training leads to better employability to graduates and income increase which can be a successful pathway to livelihood enhancement for youth in Bangladesh. On the contrary, the findings also illustrate that there may be a mismatch between the skills that graduates possess and the areas of available works, as some of the employed graduates stating that they were not working in the field of their training.

Mthodology

A pretested semi-structured graduate/beneficiaries' questionnaire was used for the quantitative data collection. For the qualitative part, FGDs, IDs, and KIIs, were used. The data was collected in tablet and data quality was ensured through Survey CTO platform.