Statistics Estonia

Population and Social Statistics Department

Tatari 51, 10134 Tallinn

The Continuing Vocational Training Survey (CVTS) collects information on enterprises’ investment in the continuing vocational training of their staff. Continuing vocational training (CVT) refers to education or training measures or activities which are financed in total or at least partly by the enterprise (directly or indirectly). Part financing could include the use of work-time for the training activity as well as financing of training equipment.
Information available from the CVTS is grouped around the following topics:
- Provision of CVT courses and other forms of CVT (training/non-training enterprises)
- CVT strategies
- Participants in CVT courses
- Costs of CVT courses
- Time spent in CVT courses
- Characteristics of CVT courses
- Assessment of CVT activities
The CVTS also collects some information on initial vocational training (IVT).
For further information see the CVTS 6 legislation (http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/education-and-training/legislation) and the CVTS 6 implementation manual (http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/education-and-training/methodology).

The main groupings for enterprises are by economic activity (NACE), size group and training/non-training enterprises.

CVTS 6 covers all economic activities defined in sections B to N and R to S of NACE Rev. 2. 

Definitions as well as the list of variables covered are available in the CVTS 6 implementation manual (http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/education-and-training/methodology).

The statistical unit for CVTS 6 is the enterprise.

Enterprise definition is compliant with Council Regulation (EEC) No 696/93.

CVTS 6 covers enterprises with 10 or more persons employed belonging to certain NACE categories (see 3.3).

Total number of enterprises in the target population was 7130. 

Variable A2tot (persons employed) refers to 31 December 2020.

The reference area is the whole country. No parts of the country are excluded. 

On national level, the data for reference years 1999, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020 are available.

Not applicable.

Number, EUR.

The reference year for CVTS 6 is the calendar year 2020.

At European level:
Basic legal act: Regulation (EC) No 1552/2005 of the European Parliament and the Council
Implementing act: Commission Regulation (EU) No 1153/2014, amending Commission Regulation (EC) No 198/2006

At national level:
Not applicable.

Not applicable.

Any data disseminated or sent to Eurostat has no variables which can be used to identify the responding enterprises.

For each respondent, an anonymous ID was generated to ensure confidentiality. No enterprise is identifiable from the data sent to Eurostat or disseminated elsewhere.

In table 15.3 "Coherence - cross-domain" in annex "EE - QR tables CVTS 2020 (excel)", the aggregated data cells are suppressed if there were less than 3 respondents.

Statistics Estonia released data tables in June 2022. 

Not applicable.

All users have been granted equal access to official statistics in Estonia: dissemination dates of official statistics are announced in advance and no user category (incl. Eurostat, state authorities and mass media) is provided access to official statistics before other users. Official statistics are first published in the statistical database. If there is also a news release, it is published simultaneously with data in the statistical database. Official statistics are available on the website at 8:00 a.m. on the date announced in the release calendar.

Every 5 years.

No news releases were released linked to the data.

No publications for CVTS 6 data have yet been published.

The aggregated data for key variables can be found in the database of Statistics Estonia https://andmed.stat.ee/en/stat/sotsiaalelu__haridus__taiskasvanute-koolitus__taiskasvanute-koolitus-ettevetetes

Not applicable.

Legal persons and organisations can use the micro-data for scientific research. The data can be used on a safe centre computer or remotely, depending on the nature of the data and contract conditions. A more detailed description of processing the application and data use conditions can be found in the standard “Procedure for the dissemination of confidential data for scientific purposes".

There has been no other dissemination.

Not applicable.

The main methodological document is the Eurostat manual. There are no special national reports on methodology, as the Eurostat methodology was followed closely.

Not applicable.

The main documentation on quality management and assessment is the quality report to Eurostat.

The online questionnaire used had some basic controls in place, to prevent major errors in data entry. After the data collection, recoding of the variables took place. During this process, any irregularities were removed from the dataset.

The overall quality of the survey is good. The main strength of the survey is the comparability with other countries, which will lead to better conclusions overall.

There were however problems with online environment used for survey, as this was more appropriate for private individuals rather than legal entities, so that has probably contributed to higher non-response rate for CVTS 6.

Users of the results from the surveys are in the first hand the European Council, the European Parliament and the European Commission in monitoring and analyzing the development of Lifelong Learning in the European Union.

The survey results are also of interest to persons engaged in the educational sector, educational institutions and ministries in Estonia. Results of the survey are expected to be used for evaluation and possibly for defining new political initiatives in the area of continuing vocational training.

No user satisfaction surveys have been conducted. As European level user groups are the main users for this survey, it would be too early to analyse user satisfaction before any dissemination from Eurostat.

The final dataset covers all NACE sectors, enterprise size groups and variables as requested in the CVTS 6 legislation (http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/education-and-training/legislation).

Not applicable.

Overall, the CVTS 6 estimates have a good quality and are trustworthy.

The sampling method used was stratified random sampling. The sample was stratified by NACE Rev. 2 and size category according to the following minimum specifications:

- 20 NACE Rev. 2 categories [B, C10-C12, C13-C15, C17-C18, C19-C23, C24-C25, C26-C28+C33, C29-C30, C16+C31-C32, D-E, F, G45, G46, G47, H, I, J, K64-K65, K66, L+M+N+R+S],
- 3 enterprise size categories, according to their number of persons employed: (10-49) (50-249) (250 and more).

A frozen frame of the business registry is taken in early November, and it contains information on all active enterprises, their activity type, and so on. Each enterprise is assigned a permanent random number when it first enters the registry. Enterprises are then sampled based on the frozen frame later in November.

The population is stratified according to NACE as well as the number of persons employed. Enterprises with more than 50 persons employed are surveyed totally. In each stratum, enterprises are arranged first by their accumulated response burden (as measured by the cumulative number of questionnaires an enterprise has to answer over all coordinated surveys), then by their permanent random numbers. From the list of enterprises who were a part of the previous year’s sample, 30% with the highest burden are removed. Then enterprises with the lowest burden who were not in the sample last year are added until the desired sample size for the stratum is achieved.

For estimation and grossing-up procedures, the enterprises were weighted in accordance with the total population and the number of respondents in the strata.

See table 13.2.1 "Sampling errors - indicators" in annex "EE - QR tables CVTS 2020 (excel)".

No additional information.

See table 13.3.1 "Coverage error" in annex "EE - QR tables CVTS 2020 (excel)".

See table 13.3.1.1 "Over-coverage - rate" in annex "EE - QR tables CVTS 2020 (excel)". 

Not applicable.

To prevent measurement errors, the respondents of the online questionnaire had access to detailed definitions of the terms used and additional help texts. This reduces the cases where the respondents misunderstand the topic covered and provide wrong information as a result. 

The unit non-response for CVTS 6 was larger than five years earlier for CVTS 5.

The variables with the biggest non-response were the ones that had been subjected to different routing and filtering, due to changes in the national questionnaire compared to the Eurostat questionnaire. The respondents who were routed past these questions were still coded as non-respondents for Eurostat (in accordance with the Eurostat manual rules) and the actual item non-response was fairly low. The highest item non-response was for the detailed breakdown of the costs, as it was complicated for the respondents to assess such a detailed breakdown.

See table 13.3.3.1 "Unit non-response - rate" in annex "EE - QR tables CVTS 2020 (excel)".

See table 13.3.3.2 "Item non-response - rate" in annex "EE - QR tables CVTS 2020 (excel)".

For data processing and editing R scripts were used. No additional errors were caused by coding or editing.

No errors due to model assumption.

The reference period for CVTS 6 is the calendar year 2020.

Reference period: 2020. Data was published in June 2022.

Not relevant. 

Data have been delivered according to relevant regulations.

See table 14.2 "Project phases - dates" in annex "EE - QR tables CVTS 2020 (excel)".

Not applicable.

All concepts and definitions were the same as in the Eurostat CVTS manual.

See table 15.1 "Comparability - geographical" in annex "EE - QR tables CVTS 2020 (excel)".

Some additional information related to COVID-19 was collected, see also table 15.1 "Comparability - geographical" in annex "EE - QR tables CVTS 2020 (excel)".

Not applicable.

See table 15.2 "Comparability - over time" in annex "EE - QR tables CVTS 2020 (excel)".

Not applicable.

See table 15.3 "Coherence - cross-domain" in annex "EE - QR tables CVTS 2020 (excel)".

Not applicable.

Not applicable.

CVTS results for a given reference year are based on the same microdata and results are calculated using the same estimation methods, therefore the data are internally coherent.

The main cost associated with CVTS 6 was the working time spent. No exact figures are available.

There has been a decrease in response rate compared with CVTS 5, that might suggest that the burden on respondents was higher. Online environment to fill the CVTS questionnaire is not the same that enterprise's usually use to fill questionnaires for Statistics Estonia.

Not applicable.

Not applicable.

Not applicable.

Data is collected mainly by a common European questionnaire translated into Estonian and filled by a sample of Estonian enterprises. In addition to the data based on the questionnaire a small part of data has been collected from existing data registers of enterprises.

See also table 18.1 "Source data and data collection" in annex "EE - QR tables CVTS 2020 (excel)".

Every 5 years.

Questionnaires were filled mainly via computer (CAWI interviews). But there were a very small amount of enterprises that were allowed to fill the questionnaire on paper. 

See also table 18.1 "Source data and data collection" in annex "EE - QR tables CVTS 2020 (excel)".

In the annexes there are attached the questionnaires used for Estonian CVTS 6.

Several automatic checks were implemented in the web-questionnaire to prevent erroneous answers. Data were validated with the Edamis control program in order to conduct field level and record level checks. Field level checks control whether valid codes and ranges are used and check for the coherence between a variable entry and allowed entries, whereas record level checks test the consistency between variables for a single enterprise record.

Imputation was conducted on specific variables (so called core variables) specified by Eurostat. A weighting procedure was applied on strata, which were formed according to two main characteristics: the main activity and the size class of the company according to the number of employees. The weighting factor was calculated as the ratio of the total set of the corresponding layer and the number of answered units. 

See table 18.5.1 "Imputation - rate" in annex "EE - QR tables CVTS 2020 (excel)".

Not applicable.

Not applicable.