EDUCATION FOR WORK IN A CHANGING WORLD: A CRITICAL SYSTEMATIC REVIEW AND A MULTIDIMENSIONAL COMPETENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR AFRICAN SYSTEMS

Abstract

The debate on professional competence often contrasts technical knowledge with transferable skills, although labour-market transitions depend on their interaction with experience, identity and institutional conditions. This article examines how different scientific traditions and policy documents explain that interaction and proposes an integrative architecture for technical and vocational education and training. A critical systematic review was conducted on a directed corpus of 35 sources published between 1964 and 2026 and verified through journals, publishers, repositories and international organisations. The corpus comprises eight empirical studies or empirical syntheses, one systematic review, thirteen theoretical contributions, two handbooks and eleven institutional documents. Because populations, measures and outcomes were not commensurable, a pooled statistical effect was not calculated; synthesis without meta-analysis was applied through thematic coding, directional comparison and appraisal of inferential strength. Twenty-three sources address the complementarity of technical and transferable skills, eighteen focus on curriculum-work articulation, thirteen conceptualise employability as multidimensional, thirteen discuss digital, green or lifelong-learning transitions, and only six explicitly address African contexts. The analysis supports a five-layer architecture: epistemic-technical foundation, cognitive mobilisation, socio-professional coordination, longitudinal adaptability and institutional framing. Employability should not be attributed solely to individuals. TVET reform requires integrated curricula, supervised practice and longitudinal evaluation. The article’s contribution is to replace fragmented skill lists with a relational and testable model that can be adapted to African systems.