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Articulation with the productive and social environment

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Training for work is impossible without knowing what for and what kind, what lacks need to be overcome and what resources have to be developed in the person being trained. It is still more difficult to achieve high quality vocational training -which includes as a condition pertinence and equity- without knowing the requirements, expectations and potentials of the productive sector and of those who produce, women and men. This axiom has always been a source of worry for training policies, but, as from the last years of the twentieth century it has become a greater challenge still and a source of questioning regarding its role, organisation and methodologies.

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The same as people, who in order to face the crisis of permanent, stable, ascending and formal employment have to develop and strengthen new competencies and become managers of their own employability strategies, training policies need to create new capacities for an accurate and systematic reading of the productive world so that they may guide the training offer, but also assist students in the identification and opening of new spaces for employability. Since the world of work is one of the arenas in which gender discriminations appear more clearly and persistently, an accurate reading does not appear likely without the transversal and systematic inclusion of the gender approach. During the last decades, the institutions' most significant efforts and resources have been devoted to reading the demand, which has led to the sudden appearance of new organisational modalities regarding training and to the centrality that competency-based training, the quality management and labour intermediation have today. The first two aim at the adjustment between labour offer and demand by means of an up to date correspondence between training profiles and requirements, and the latter one, aims at decreasing unemployment. The need for this correspondence is indisputable, as are the methodological and strategic difficulties and costs regarding trained human resources and the time required, first for identification, and then for didactic transposition, later on, for the requirements of a context marked by uncertainty, obsolescence of knowledge and change and/or disappearance of occupational profiles and jobs. Currently, an acceptance of the most adequate solution being competency-based training, has been reached by the majority, regardless of the methodology applied, but there is still a long way to go before the generalisation of the effective definition of profiles and the development of competency-based syllabi is achieved. Regarding gender reading, progress has reached the conclusion that it is more convenient to take it into account, that is, except in rare exceptions, we have not gone beyond enunciating or affirming the principle of equality of opportunities. When the FORMUJER Programme began in 1998, revision and updating of the offer as from the interaction with the productive sector was only just beginning and the gender transversalization was only being formulated. Therefore, its first aim was to sensitise people regarding its "linking" role with the productive sector, the need to incorporate and interact with demand and regarding its role within a training policy aimed at improving the pertinence of offer and at the same time remove gender and social inequality discriminations and barriers. Such interaction implies an essential change which is at the same time hard, complex and sustained, and which must be expressed not only by institutionalising the specific spaces and resources to cater for the relations, but in the didactic and pedagogic methodologies and strategies as well. Hence the grounds for its being included as a policy component. According to the conceptual and methodological axis of the proposed models, the co-ordination with the productive sector must determine the training needs, update occupational profiles, fuel the information system regarding labour offer and require the identification of the current unsatisfied demand, and in the middle term, define possible female employment niches and open new ones by means of sensitisation or promotion. This co-ordination is also essential to enable labour practice and the joint implementation of training actions which may improve employability alternatives and respond to requirements and previous agreements of those demanding labour force. The lines of action developed were as follows: Conceptualisation, promotion and organisation of the System of Information and Guidance and Intermediation of labour supply and demand. Objectives To systematise national information on supply and demand to characterise present unsatisfied demand, that feasible in the medium term and potential demand to be generated by means of articulations with players and agents of local development. To identify the occupational areas, specialities and profiles capable of insertion, paying priority attention to low income women. Sensitising and training the productive sector Objectives To encourage awareness of the relations between a policy of equality on the job, an adequate management of human capital and the strengthening of entrepreneurial competitiveness. The area of labour relations is especially potent for preaching equity because it allows the inclusion in agreements of many aspects of a positive action programme. To assign a new economic and social value to female qualities and singularities, taking advantage of the way they match with occupational profiles emerging from the new productive and organisational paradigm, with the search for improvement in the quality of life and with the preservation of the environment. To inform on the Programme, the role of training and the contributions that it may make to the needs of the sector. To identify and promote new employment niches –which have so far not been available for women due to gender discrimination– or those that may be created on the basis of articulation with local and community development agents. Generation of mechanisms of articulation between the training centre and the productive and social setting Objectives To agree to undertake joint training actions or actions at the request of the productive and social setting. Articulating with the Curriculum Development component, to promote and organise the participation of workers and entrepreneurs in identifying competencies and training needs required for each profile and contributing to the development of the respective methodologies. To authorise and monitor the practical phase of learning, which implies identifying the places, removing obstacles to participation of women, negotiating conditions, signing agreements for them to be carried out, relating to the instructor staff, accompanying the beneficiaries, with special attention paid to the situation of women to prevent restraints and gender discriminations, etc. However, the deterioration of the employment crisis and training becoming an essential feature for employability and the creation of an OP, led to a redefinition of this component, in order to: Extend its scope of action, conceiving it as a link with the productive and social environment and not only with the entrepreneurial sector so as to reflect the truth regarding employment and promote the active participation of the various protagonists and institutions which take part in the creation of working positions. Intensifying the co-ordination with compensation Guidance and Strategies features in order to strengthen participants' employability and for the individual OP's requirements or those of micro enterprises (e.g. complementing them with other credit or support granting programs for micro-enterprises). But also, in order to meet their demands for support in the post-training or "childhood" stages of the productive enterprise, that is, to provide assistance in the development of the participants' entrepreneurial and management competencies, which may be approached through the different "windows" of the IFP itself or by co-ordinating and complementing with other specialised entities. Conceiving it as a feature of co-ordination and promotion, which grants training a proactive role regarding the environment, through mediation, articulation with local development programs, programs of support to micro-enterprises, enterprise nurseries, etc. That is, to go from the role of reader of an environment to become a promoter of strategies and alternatives of employability. Incorporating a varied and flexible repertory of strategies based on complementation and co-ordination and aimed at enabling the social dialog regarding the role of training as a tool for equity and personal, sectoral and local development. Such redefinition is the product of the context's conditions and of the lessons learnt, and has proved to be very relevant for responding to the challenges that realities such as informal economy and self-managed work bring up in the training of women and men.

 

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