ILO standards
ILO Recommendation No. 150: Human Resources Development (1975)
R150 is the International Labour Organization's 1975 recommendation on vocational guidance and training. It travelled with Convention No. 142 and remained the reference text for almost thirty years, until the 2004 revision.
Key facts
The record below summarises what can be stated with confidence from the official database NORMLEX and from the text of the companion convention.
- Official title
- Human Resources Development Recommendation, 1975 (No. 150)
- Adopted
- 1975, at the 60th session of the International Labour Conference
- Companion
- Human Resources Development Convention, 1975 (No. 142), adopted on 23 June 1975
- Successor
- R195 states that it “revises and replaces” the 1975 recommendation, see our R195 guide
The convention it accompanied
Conventions bind the countries that ratify them, while recommendations explain how to carry the commitments out. Convention C142 is the binding half of the pair, and R150 supplied the practical detail around it.
Article 1 of Convention C142 asks each member to adopt and develop comprehensive and co-ordinated policies and programmes of vocational guidance and vocational training, closely linked with employment, in particular through public employment services. The same article says these policies should take account of regional and national employment needs, of the stage of economic, social and cultural development and of how human resources development relates to other objectives.
How R195 changed the picture
Comparing the 1975 convention with the 2004 recommendation shows how thinking about skills moved from training for a job towards learning over a whole working life.
| Theme | Emphasis of Convention C142, Article 1 | Emphasis of R195 (2004) |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Vocational guidance and vocational training, closely linked with employment | Education, training and lifelong learning treated as one system |
| Delivery | Public employment services named as the channel | Shared commitments of government, enterprises and individuals, with training providers under quality assurance |
| Recognition of skills | Not addressed in Article 1 | National qualifications framework and recognition of prior learning |
| Informal economy | Not addressed in Article 1 | Explicit aim of moving informal activity towards decent work |
| Evidence | Policies take account of employment needs and development level | Data broken down by gender and age, national indicators, research |
The comparison is our own reading and covers Article 1 of the convention only. Read the full originals on NORMLEX before citing either text.
Old links to the 150 knowledge base
Academic papers from the 2000s often cite web addresses beginning with /ilo/150_base/, the path of a former online knowledge base about Recommendation 150. Those references now lead to this page, or to the matching country row on the apprenticeships overview when the old address named a country.