The vocational training reflex

Unemployment is one of Syria’s most significant challenges and, like hummus in a Damascene restaurant, Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) is almost always listed on the menu as a solution. Across donor and humanitarian programs, TVET repeatedly appears as the default intervention to address unemployment, strengthen livelihoods and resilience, and upgrade human capital. Over the past years, tens of thousands of Syrians, across genders, age groups, geographies, and displacement statuses, have passed through at least one TVET programme. These have ranged from hairdressing, sewing, carpentry, bricklaying, food processing, and handicrafts to mobile phone repair, solar installation and maintenance, automotive repair, graphic design, and basic health support roles.

Yet many of these programmes have resulted in limited job placement and weak retention, raising questions about their effectiveness in fragile contexts such as Syria. TVET is intuitively appealing. It aligns with the logic of “do not give me a fish, teach me how to catch one,” translating in development terms into livelihoods rather than assistance. For donors, it is scalable, relatively inexpensive, easy to deploy, and politically safe. Over time, programming evolved to include in-kind or cash grants, short-term wage subsidies, and dual approaches combining classroom training with apprenticeships in firms.

Looking into viable alternatives to TVET involves understanding the scale of the challenge and the structure of the economy. In 2010, Syria’s workforce stood at around 5 million people, with the private sector accounting for roughly 75 percent of total employment. Around 98 percent of enterprises employed fewer than 50 workers, meaning economic activity was overwhelmingly concentrated in micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs).

At the same time, approximately 300,000 people entered the labour force each year and it is thought that present numbers are similar or even higher. Demographic momentum, return migration and ongoing public sector contraction suggest annual labour force inflows in the hundreds of thousands, placing sustained absorptive pressure on the private MSME sector.

Unemployment, estimated at around 9 percent in 2010, is now believed to stand at about 43 percent, although there are no precise figures. As the public sector no longer functions as an employer of last resort, the burden of absorbing both new entrants and displaced workers now falls almost entirely on the private MSME economy.

Technical Assistance (TA) to MSMEs addresses this challenge by strengthening private firms’ capacity to grow and hire, rather than focusing on skills supply alone.

Like TVET, TA is conceptually straightforward but operationally demanding. It is harder to design, costlier to implement, slower to scale and slower to show results. TA is not a silver bullet for growth or job creation. Its effectiveness depends on firm behaviour, market conditions, and sustained engagement. In Syria’s context, however, TA has the potential to play a critical role in economic recovery, provided it is not reduced to generic business training or used as a substitute for more expansive economic reform.

TA does not translate into jobs automatically. Advisory support or compliance upgrades may stabilise firms without leading to new hiring. Job creation occurs only when firms expand, diversify or formalise, and when the perceived risk of hiring falls below the cost of maintaining existing operations. TA can contribute to this shift, but only under specific conditions.

TA must be firm- and market-driven, not supply-led. Interventions should respond to concrete constraints such as cost structures, productivity bottlenecks or quality standards rather than defaulting to generic business training.

Concerns around elite capture, favouritism, or reinforcing inequalities are real and must be addressed explicitly. MSMEs encompass a wide spectrum of firms, requiring transparent and defensible selection logic. Larger firms should be supported only when they play a catalytic role within a value chain and generate spillover effects. For example, a large cold storage, sorting, and processing facility, when expanded, unlocks high-value or cash-crop production, reduces post-harvest losses, and stimulates upstream farming and downstream services in its locality. In such cases, support should be conditional, with firms committing to capital investment, infrastructure expansion, and job creation, with TA being delivered progressively as milestones are met. Smaller firms may face lower entry thresholds but should be held to the same standards in commitments, performance and employment outcomes.

Access to finance remains essential for firm growth, yet Syria’s financial sector is largely non-functional and will take time to recover. TA therefore can play a critical role in making MSMEs investment-ready. With appropriate support, firms can attract foreign and local investment even in the absence of functioning credit markets by accessing capital through equity, partnerships or grant-based mechanisms rather than traditional lending.

International evidence clarifies the trade-offs between training-led and firm-led approaches. In low-income and fragile contexts, where training is short-term and labour demand is weak, TVET placement rates typically lie between 10 and 30 percent, with retention declining sharply over time. Syria fits this profile. Assuming a mid-range placement rate of 20 percent and a conservative 12-month retention rate of 30 percent, only a small share of TVET participants can be expected to remain employed one year after training.

Short-term TVET programs in fragile contexts typically cost $300 - 1,200 per participant. In theory, using a mid-range estimate of $800, training the roughly 300,000 people entering the labour market each year would require about $240 million. Under conservative assumptions, only 20 percent would secure initial employment, and only 30 percent of those would remain employed after 12 months. This translates into approximately 18,000 one-year jobs, implying a training cost of roughly $13,300 per sustained job. In Syria’s current economic context, this is an extremely high cost for each durable employment outcome.

Firm-level TA follows a different logic. Evaluations of MSME support programmes show TA packages typically cost $3,000 - 30,000 per firm. Across manufacturing, agro-processing, and tradable services, supported MSMEs commonly generate between 3 and 15 net jobs over 12 to 24 months, with 12-month retention rates exceeding 70 percent. Even under conservative assumptions, this implies a cost per sustained job in the range of $2,500 - 5,000. On this metric, firm-level TA consistently outperforms large-scale, short-term TVET in low-demand environments.

Successful TVET systems emerge where skills development is embedded in a growing economy. This has been the case in South Korea, Vietnam, and Germany, where vocational education evolved alongside industrial growth and strong private sector participation. In these contexts, TVET supplies skills to expanding sectors rather than attempting to create jobs on its own.

This is relevant to Syria because the country already possesses a long-standing public TVET system. Established in the mid-1960s and expanded from the 1980s onward, it delivers vocational education through secondary schools and intermediate technical institutes in the fields of commerce, industry, construction, healthcare, ICT, hospitality, tourism, and agriculture. The system has long suffered, however, from outdated curricula, limited practical exposure, and weak connectivity with employers. 

Its scale nevertheless creates significant opportunities for targeted intervention. Rather than building parallel structures, selective investments can update curricula in priority fields, introduce modern technologies, retrain instructors, and strengthen links with the private sector. In many cases, upgrading the skills of graduates who have already spent years in the system can be more impactful than training new cohorts for a few weeks. Faced with a choice between a short-term trainee and a vocational graduate whose outdated training has been refreshed and aligned with current technologies, most firms will choose the latter.

To achieve a sustained economic recovery in Syria, neither TVET nor TA can substitute for government action through macroeconomic policy, new regulations, and institutional reform. Unemployment is fundamentally a macroeconomic challenge and cannot be solved through micro-level interventions alone. That said, well-designed TA can address binding constraints and sector-specific bottlenecks in ways that generate sustained impact at scale.

The agri-food sector is one that could benefit enormously. In 2010 it produced 30 percent of Syria's manufactured products and 10 percent of overall exports. As Syria enters a new economic phase following the lifting of sanctions, MSMEs in this sector face unprecedented market access opportunities yet remain constrained by gaps in finance, technology, standards and trade networks. TA can help firms to support sector-wide upgrading in quality and food safety and strengthen linkages with local agriculture as demand for inputs grows.

TVET is most often deployed when job creation is politically, financially or operationally difficult, functioning in practice as a proxy intervention. The horizon in Syria is now wider. TVET cannot create labour demand on its own. Used wisely, it can raise skills, productivity and incomes, but it rarely generates new jobs. Where TVET works is when it is sequenced alongside or after TA programmes. 

This analysis was provided exclusively by Syrian Ventures Alliance, an investment and economic advisory platform.