Digitalization and Industry 4.0/5.0 Integration in Technical and Vocational Education and Training: A Review

Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) is under growing pressure to reconcile its hands-on, trade-specific pedagogy with the technological and human-centric demands introduced by the Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolutions. While a substantial body of research now examines digital transformation in general education, evidence on how TVET systems absorb Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 technologies, competencies and governance arrangements remains fragmented across disciplines, regions and methodologies, making it difficult for institutions to know which interventions are worth prioritizing. This review synthesizes 59 peer-reviewed and institutional sources, published mainly between 2018 and 2026, to map how digitalization is reshaping TVET teacher competency, curriculum and institutional frameworks, student and graduate outcomes, technology adoption, industry-education-government partnership, and digital equity. Sources were drawn from databases including Scopus, Web of Science, ScienceDirect and IEEE Xplore, and from open-access outlets such as Sustainability and Frontiers in Education, and were synthesized thematically rather than statistically pooled, following a coding protocol adapted from established framework-synthesis practice. Findings show that curriculum and institutional competency frameworks dominate the literature (23.7%), followed by technology-adoption studies on digital twins, virtual reality and artificial intelligence (16.9%) and student and graduate-outcome studies (15.3%), while critical accounts of the persistent disconnect between TVET providers and industry remain scarce (1.7%), despite offering some of the most consequential findings in the corpus. Geographically, evidence clusters around Malaysia, wider Southeast Asia and cross-national bibliometric reviews, leaving Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the Middle East thinly represented. A conceptual framework is proposed that positions technology-enhanced delivery as the mechanism converting Industry 4.0/5.0 inputs into employability, human-centric competencies and inclusive TVET outcomes, mediated by a policy and financing feedback loop. From the review, digitalization will not solve the structural misalignment between TVET and industry on its own; rather, it needs to go hand in hand with teacher development and curriculum evaluation, equity and policy coherence.

TVET, Industry 4.0, Industry 5.0, Digitalization, Digital Competency

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