Over the past decade, the Belt and Road Initiative has evolved from a grand vision into a concrete network of international cooperation. Along this journey, Chinese vocational education — deeply linked to economic growth and social development — has emerged as a vital bridge for international exchanges.

Flagship cooperation programs, such as the Luban Workshop, the Silk Road Institute and the Zheng He Institute, have helped China's vocational education step onto the global stage. They have taken root in BRI partner countries and become powerful drivers for boosting employment, improving livelihoods, supporting industrial development and fostering people-to-people exchanges across regions.

However, in recent years, amid the complexity in the global political and economic landscape and the advancement of a new round of technological and industrial revolution, the internationalization of Chinese vocational education has entered a more complex phase. It requires a crucial transformation from simply "going global" to "integrating into" and "advancing together" with partner countries.

A key challenge in this process is cross-cultural adaptation. BRI partner countries differ widely in social customs, religious beliefs, education systems, industrial structures and governance models. If vocational education cooperation focuses only on technical transfer without aligning with local realities, it will not be able to achieve healthy and sustainable development. The integration of China's vocational education standards, curriculum content and teaching methodologies with local sociocultural environments, labor markets and legal frameworks has become central to achieving high-quality development.

Another bottleneck is the shortage of competent and well-structured international faculty. The global outreach of vocational education requires interdisciplinary teachers who not only master professional skills and understand the industrial needs of overseas markets, but also possess excellent cross-cultural communication capabilities and the awareness of innovative teaching practices for local contexts. Such talent is scarce.

Furthermore, the training systems for faculty internationalization, as well as the mechanisms for recognizing and promoting teachers' overseas teaching experience, remain underdeveloped. This has severely impacted the quality, continuity and sustainability of overseas vocational education programs.

The integration of vocational education and industry also remains superficial. Although many foreign vocational colleges have partnered with Chinese enterprises, most collaborations are limited to basic models such as order-based training and internship placement. Deeper collaboration, such as co-developing curriculum systems, sharing technological resources and nurturing teaching teams, is limited. The result is a mismatch between the skill demands of enterprises and the talent supply of vocational colleges.

The digital and green transformation of global industries has placed new demands on vocational education. International cooperation should proactively jump on the bandwagon of transformative trends by incorporating emerging sectors, such as digital skills, green technologies and artificial intelligence, into curricula. It is also essential to leverage digital tools to build cross-border learning communities, cultivating technical personnel and skilled workers equipped with global competence.

The internationalization of vocational education is a systemic project that blends institutional innovation with people-to-people exchange. Stronger intergovernmental dialogue and top-level policy design are essential, alongside various forms of multilateral frameworks, improved policy support and risk prevention mechanisms.

At the same time, industry associations, leading enterprises and vocational colleges should be encouraged to establish regional vocational education alliances, enabling shared standards, information flow and resource pooling to form a synergetic force for advancement. For this, several priorities deserve particular attention.

First, it is important to move forward the flexible outreach and localized innovation of curriculum systems based on China's high-quality vocational education standards. By combining the industrial development needs and labor market demands of different countries, vocational colleges should work with local educational institutions and industry organizations to develop project-based curricula. Multilingual open digital teaching resource platforms will help consolidate the adaptability and practicality of vocational education, driving vocational education from a one-way standard output to a two-way co-creation.

Second, a high-quality and internationalized professional workforce should be cultivated and the corresponding long-term mechanisms improved. Programs should be implemented for strengthening teachers' competence, fostering their global vision and cross-cultural communication skills through overseas study visits and qualifications. Equally important are sound evaluation systems and incentive policies for teachers participating in overseas education programs to ensure sustained participation in international cooperation.

Third, vocational colleges must collaborate with Chinese enterprises operating overseas and local enterprises. By co-building overseas training bases and aligning talent training pathways with enterprises, vocational institutes can promote the integration of education, talent and industrial chains in overseas markets.

It is imperative that colleges embed digital empowerment into vocational education, expand their roles in fostering people-to-people exchanges and extend the usefulness of smart education platforms and virtual simulation technologies to break the temporal and spatial constraints of teaching delivery.

Sectors such as green technologies, the circular economy and low-carbon management offer vast potential to raise the quality of teaching. Greater emphasis on learning languages, art and literacy will enable vocational education to enhance technical skills and promote environmental friendliness among BRI partner countries.

The author is the executive director of the Belt and Road Tianjin Strategic Research Institute and a professor at the School of International Business of Tianjin Foreign Studies University.

The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily.