Thailand's efforts to widen access to high-level vocational education for disadvantaged youth increasingly depend on partnerships among colleges, industry, and intermediary funders such as the Equitable Education Fund (EEF). Yet little is known about how such partnerships are converted into institutional outcomes. This paper develops and operationalizes a serial mediation model in which inter-organizational collaboration strategy (IOCS) influences the effectiveness of vocational education management (EVEM) through two sequential mechanisms: vocational education management (VEM) and competency-based work-integrated learning (WIL). Drawing on the resource-based view, resource dependence theory, collaborative governance and collaborative advantage theories, and experiential learning theory, five hypotheses are specified. The paper then describes an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design for testing the model in the EEF High-Level Vocational Innovation Scholarship Project, which involves 121 vocational institutions under the Office of the Vocational Education Commission. The quantitative phase targets 330 administrators, department heads, and teachers using a 55-item, five-point questionnaire covering four latent constructs and ten subscales, to be analyzed through a two-step structural equation modeling approach; the qualitative phase involves 20 key informants. Content validity was examined by five experts using the index of item–objective congruence, and a try-out with 30 respondents yielded Cronbach's alpha coefficients of 0.953–0.978 for subscales and 0.994 for the full instrument. The framework clarifies why memoranda of understanding alone are unlikely to raise effectiveness unless they are translated into management systems and co-designed workplace learning, and it offers funders and colleges a diagnostic tool for partnership-based vocational reform.
Keywords: inter-organizational collaboration, vocational education management, work-integrated learning, educational effectiveness, serial mediation