Higher Vocational Institutions A Competitive Advantage Based On Value Chain Management

CPC Central Committee and State Council issued the National Long-term Education Reform and Development Plan (2010-2020) on July29,2010, which states that the development of vocational education is an important way to promote economic development, increase employment and improve people’s living standrad. And the development of vocational education can help solve the problems of farmers’and ease the labor supply. Thus we must take vocational education in a more prominent position. Vocational education should meet the needs of every person and every community as well as cultivate the students’professional ethics, skills and employability. Facing the increasingly fierce competition, higher vocational institutions not only compete with one another, but also compete with other commen colleges and universities. At the same time, many colleges and universities are trying out methods to enable students to obtain vocational skills by opening skills training courses in order to help the students get more certificates when they get their bachelor’s degrees. It is necessary for vocational colleges to get a good idea about their competitive advantages, to participate in the competition as well as enhance and maintain development in the competition if vocational colleges want to survive and develop in the fierce competition, to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage, to increase employment opportunities and to achieve scientific development and sustainable development.Porter’s Value Chain theory plays a very important role in the identification of competitive advantages. To solve the problems of the serious homogeneity of higher vocational institutions as well as the lack of competitiveness of the status quo, this article devides students cultivating process of vocational colleges into a series of factors based on the theory of Value Chain. The auther not only analyzes the Value Chain but finds out the real value-creating factors of enhancing higher vocational colleges’competitive advantages by ways of researching the advantages.Organizing the literary theory at home and abroad and combining with interviews, the thesis sums up three categories of factors that affect the competitive advantage of the higher vocational colleges:(1) teaching ability;(2) employability;(3) management capabilities. The three categories of factors includs10variable indexes which the author has summed up according to Value Chain activities in vocational colleges, and then the author gives out the assumptions and the competitive advantages of the higher vocational colleges. The results of the analysis given in this article conducted a questionnaire survey of26vocational colleges in Tianjin, and survey data for statistical analysis, conclusions and propose recommendations and further research directions to build competitive advantages of the higher vocational institutions.