Consortium-Driven Reconstruction of Talent Development Models in Secondary Vocational Programs in Finance, Business, and Trade: Underlying Mechanisms and Practical Pathways

Abstract

The digital transformation of the finance, business, and trade sectors is reshaping job content, business processes, and competency requirements. However, traditional talent development models led primarily by secondary vocational schools often struggle to respond promptly to these changes. Industry–education integration consortia bring together enterprises, vocational schools, higher education institutions, industry organizations, and research institutes, creating new organizational conditions for incorporating industry demand into the talent development process on an ongoing basis. Drawing on a literature review and normative analysis, this study examines the underlying mechanisms through which industry–education integration consortia contribute to the reconstruction of talent development models for secondary vocational programs in finance, business, and trade, with particular attention to the connection between organizational operation and the talent development process. The study argues that such consortia exert their influence through four interrelated mechanisms: organizational coordination, industry demand translation, resource transformation, and evaluation feedback. In practice, however, talent development continues to face fragmented identification of industry demand, weak translation of occupational competencies into curricula, insufficient integration of authentic projects, limited school–industry collaboration among teaching staff, and limited use of evaluation results to inform teaching improvement. To address these problems, it is necessary to establish stable coordination mechanisms for talent development and systems for monitoring industry demand, restructure curricula around typical work tasks, develop enterprise project repositories adapted for educational use, build school–industry collaborative teaching teams, and improve multi-stakeholder, process-oriented evaluation. Institutional coordination, digital platforms, and differentiated implementation should also be strengthened to establish a closed-loop talent development system linking demand identification, competency analysis, educational transformation, teaching implementation, and evaluation-based improvement.