TEC stands for Training and Enterprise Council. These were local organisations in England and Wales, set up around 1990 and paid for by the government, whose job was to run job training in their own area — teaching people the skills local employers actually needed, helping unemployed people back into work, and giving advice and money to people starting or running a small business.

The idea behind them was local control: instead of one national office deciding what training the whole country needed, each area got its own council, largely run by local business people, on the belief that they knew their own job market best. There were around eighty of them. They were closed in 2001 and their work was handed to the Learning and Skills Council and to Business Link.

So this is a historical, administrative word, and a narrow one. You will meet it in documents, news archives, and reading-comprehension texts about British education and employment policy from the 1990s — not in conversation. Note also that TEC and Tec are used for plenty of unrelated things in other contexts; this entry is only the British training council.