Czech Republic

Adult Education: A Public Employment Service established by the state in 1990 under the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs implements the labor policies of the Czech government, including adult retraining for the labor market. As of the year 2000, secondary vocational education and training schools were receiving state contracts to provide retraining opportunities to adults, since the Public Employment Service had no training centers of its own. Because of the Service's dissatisfaction with the quality and teaching approaches of many of the programs that had been developed, the Service was cooperating increasingly with education authorities by 2000 to find alternative methods for retraining workers. Private training programs for adults became increasingly common during the 1990s, and by the end of the decade, about 2,000 private training organizations were in operation. To a limited extent, private industries such as automobile factories, also had begun to offer training programs to prepare workers with new skills or to fill labor shortages in particular occupational areas needed by the industry.

Distance Education: As noted already, the Czech Republic resembles other European states in that during the 1990s increasing efforts were made to incorporate training in information and communications technology into the school curricula. By 1999 the Czech Republic had 86 Internet hosts for every 10,000 persons with 35 Internet service providers operating in the country. There were 107.2 personal computers for every 1,000 persons in the country in 1999, almost double the rate for 1995, which was 53.4 per 1,000. Televisions and radios, in use since the Communist era, have proliferated with the shift to a more-democratic government and a free-market, consumer-oriented economy, as have radio and television broadcasting stations. In 1999 some 21 AM radio stations were operating in the Czech Republic, 199 FM radio stations, and one short-wave radio station while 102 television broadcast stations (35 of them low-power stations) and about 500 repeaters transmitted television programming around the country. In December 1999 there were about 3.4 million televisions and 3.2 million radios in the Czech Republic—roughly 1 television and 1 radio for every 3 people.