Reconstructing Vocational Education under Skill Fission: The Transformation of Talent-Cultivation Logic in the Context of Emerging Technologies

Abstract

Emerging technologies, with artificial intelligence foremost among them, are inducing structural change in the global labor market and driving the skill ecosystem from linear evolution toward fission-like restructuring. Adopting the analytical perspective of “skill fission,” this paper examines the threefold impact of emerging technologies on the labor market: the technological empowerment of high-skilled groups, the heightened risk of job substitution facing middle- and low-skilled groups, and the temporal lag between educational response and technological change. It then advances a corresponding response on three levels: a human-centered approach to skill-value enhancement at the level of values, an AI-driven architecture for precise educational supply at the level of practice, and a data-enabled platform for trend forecasting at the level of technology. On this basis, the study identifies implementation paths for reconstructing the vocational education system along four dimensions—strategic positioning, the standards system, the governance structure, and the lifelong learning system. The aim is to provide a systematic response to the predicament of skill differentiation and to advance the paradigm shift of vocational education from passive adaptation to active guidance.