No original paper or review discussing on environmental destructions was printed in a series of the Bulletin of Japan Society for the Study of Vocational and Technical Education from the first issue to the last one. It seems to suggest that, in the field of reacting to environmental destructions, the Japanese studies on vocational education lagged far behind the movements which the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change came into effect in February of 2005, the system of domestic laws on environmental preservation, such as the Fundamental Law for Forming and Promoting Recycle-based Society in 2000 and so on, was established, and engineering sciences in Japan drastically changed to solve those problems for this thirty years. Japanese vocational educators and researchers should notice the concepts of the extended producers' responsibility and the metabolism between nature and human in order to get the clue to approach to vocational education as environmental education.

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Structural changes in the economy and labour market lead to substantial changes in the pattern of demand for skills. In recent decades, the skills gap has been a key issue of the education and training policy in the UK. This paper analyses New Labour's current policy agenda on employers' demand for skills, outlines the main developments and practices and discusses a perspective in this context. The government has attempted to find ways to raise the skill level and further develop employees' employability in the context of a high skill economy. In 2001, the government introduced Davies Review-the report for developing employability and enterprise skill in young people. The review places importance on personal attitude and disposition as employability. Due to this review, Enterprise Education is a statutory requirement since 2005, and pupils aged between 15 and 16 are entitled to a 5-day enterprise learning course. Evidence from surveys on current skill difficulties reveals that employers face difficulties in finding both generic and technical skills. The Skills Strategy, launched in 2003, delineates the direction of developing and providing skills. Through this analysis, the following conclusions were obtained. First, the generic skills will be increasingly important in the demand made by employers. However, there are some difficulties involved in both the provision of courses on generic skills and their assessment. Second, it has been clarified that there is a gap between learners' interest and employers' needs. It may be argued that these are the difficulties of developing skills in ways that relate directly to business needs, not individual needs.

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Depending on an analysis of the current state of training of employees of technical outsourcing companies, this paper investigates what kinds of problems there are. Employees of technical outsourcing companies are required to acquire special knowledge and a responsible attitude about their work. The amount of effort each outsourcing company puts into education and training is directly linked to increasing the value of their employees. Outsourcing companies that do not put enough effort into education will be studied to see if the lack of training appears as a gap in the success of those companies. From now on, training programs to match the needs of each individual employee are needed in order to maximize the results of training.

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