Abstract: Labor curriculum is one of the basic ways to implement labor education in the new era, and also an important measure to cultivate the core competency.The trends of international curriculum reform and development, the demands of cultivating students' labor competency in an all-round way in the new era, and the practical problems facing the school labor curriculum all require the development of labor curriculum design directed at the core competency.There are at least two approaches to the labor curriculum design oriented to core competency, namely direct guidance and indirect integration.The former one is the overall control approach.According to the overall framework of the core competency, the contribution of labor education in the core competency is clearly defined;subsequently the objectives and performance of the labor curriculum are formulated, so as to design the labor curriculum systematically.The latter one is a partial penetration approach which focuses on clarifying the correlation between core competency and labor education, and then penetrates into labor curriculum in a complementary form.A four-step framework is needed to implement the design of labor curriculum.It includes defining the connotation and elements of core competency for labor education, focusing on three fields to design labor education units, selecting the subjects and content of labor education around units, and optimizing labor curriculum through evaluation.

Key words: core competency, labor education, curriculum design