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Employability: quality, equity and gender in the design
and the management of training
and employment policies

The current labour scenario - restructured through the correlated association of knowledge, mass employment paradigmatic crisis, and the definitive and ever-growing integration of women - not only brings forth the risk of vertiginous obsolescence of jobs positions and knowledge, but also, the challenge represented by the generating of self-employment. Both conditions have direct impact on the construction of collective and individual identity, considering that the quality and quantity of employment opportunities available to any society, determine the extent of equity, since work has a decisive impact on the formulation and concretion of life projects.

Therefore, as perceived from a collective dimension, the generation of the right kind of conditions enabling men and women to fulfil their right to decent work, not only is an essential element for achieving competitiveness and productivity but also it is a means for fighting poverty.

From an individual dimension, to be able to face the employment contraction, the constant changes not only in the contents but also in the way things ought to be made, high uncertainty level, as well as the current requirements of the labour scenarios, people need to carry out constant and additional efforts of learning, be able to identify resources and opportunities, as well as having a high measure of autonomy. In order to do that, they have to be aware of their capacity, know their own resources and be aware of their limitations and to be able to co-relate it to those demands, characteristics, perspectives of insertion and labour developments currently offered by the economic and social environment.

To acknowledge that, to be able to gain access to work and to achieve social insertion, a wide range of personal and social skills are definitely needed, doesn't mean to imply, blame or make those lacking this attributes in any way responsible of this situation, and neither is it meant to exonerate either the system and/or the socio-economic policies for their role and responsibility in the qualification of opportunities. On the contrary, it outlines the need to consider the whole process of adjustment as an articulated and inter-dependent achievement of sustainable and encompassing development, including those new conditions and production demands as well as those different necessities and capabilities of both males and women.

This juxtaposition both leads and refers to those vocational training policies most suitable to achieve work since they have the responsibility of becoming a meeting place, the connection space, linking and/or co-ordinating the necessities and possibilities of the productive system and those of the people - males and women - who aim to fulfil those services.

Thus, and in order to intensify more than ever the technical and vocational training which constitutes a fundamental human right and is considered an essential component of the Decent Work Agenda, performing a decisive role in the configuration of an environmental space that allows it to be possible. There won't be a chance of obtaining decent work without democracy, justice, social justice and citizen participation. And there is no other way to achieve this but through education and technical and vocational training for work.

The training policies alone cannot generate employment, but have the potentiality of negotiating, by means of an integrative and systemic focus, the knowledge, efforts , as well as the instances and resources of those different protagonists converging in their generation and, should above all, support people so that they go undergo the transformation going from a passive status - depending from external intervention to bring and place them near to increasing lack of labour opportunities - to an active one, with active fellows seeking and creating their own job opportunities.

In order to do it, it is necessary:

• To interact with the productive and social environment, and through monitoring and understanding their requirements and indications, to adapt and strengthen the quality of training, thus, contributing to make possible that occupational development is both relevant and effective so as to increase productivity and competitiveness and also to improve people working conditions.
• To centre the focus in the person that is being trained in order to:
  - to conceive it as a integral human being, conditioned by their gender and social and economic realities, based on their skills and experiences, knowledge, feelings and values from which can change and improve their conditions of social and labor insertion by means of individual and collective strategies.
  - to recover and to strengthen during and through the training programs those competencies that go beyond and across the different occupational fields and remain forever helping and present throughout diverse life situations.
• To revise their methodologies and practices to make of vocational training an instrument to increase opportunities for women and men, to promote equity, eliminating barriers and explicit and hidden messages tending to limitate the real potentialities of human beings.

From this point of view, the design and management of vocational training policies towards labour should be guided to:

* To make "a crucial nexus - an indivisible binomial" out of quality and equity .
* To incorporate the vocational training to enhance the employment, citizenship and gender perspective in an inter-related and mainstreaming aproach.

By adopting these two big premises allows for the attention to be wholly centred, in an integral and articulate approach, on those conditions and requirements of the competencies within the current job market and also on those of people; on the characteristics and demands of the new occupational profiles and on the appraisal necessities, as well as full development and strengthening of the individual capacities.

With this in mind, it becomes necessary to revise and re-formulate from these arenas, the diverse components and dimensions of the training tasks.

Thus, and only to mention just a few, it will be required:

• To adopt an integral and systemic guideline that can be understood from both: the skills and vocational training arenas, and which acting as a whole complex reality with interconnecting dimensions and components, is linked directly or indirectly in permanent interaction.
• To revise the network of actors that take action within the local labour context who will have to be necessarily co-ordinated and brought into the net. To identify new actors (would those already known be enough? )
• To arbitrate mechanisms of curriculum upgrading. To integrate and combine disciplines suitable for proposal construction, to better collaborate among different technical and occupational fields, lending assistance to the ones evidencing the mainstreaming characteristics of many of the most appreciated (valued) competencies found within job duties.
• To revise the curriculum in contents and methods.
• To certify profiles and competencies or to validate the offer by the recognition of the differents actors.
• To assist, not only to the female / male levels of participation in the courses, but also to the conditions in which they do it . To observe" how they do it." To considerate the different ways of participating in the processes, to design the offer, leaving stereotypes out of it.

From this frame of reference, one of the main principles of Cinterfor/ILO action has been the wish to recover, to articulate and to promote the national and regional learning and efforts focus on the continuous improvement of vocational training as a tool to promote not only equality of opportunities but also as a means to fight against poverty and discrimination. This will to construct collectively and to socialize the accumulated knowledge acquired during the last decade, has been reinforced by the execution of the Programs FORMUJER, PROIMUJER and QUALITY AND EQUITY IN THE VOCATIONAL TRAINING.

The implementation of these interventions has allowed Cinterfor/ILO and the different executive entities to have a powerful learning and experimenting platform:

• to develop and systematise a model of policies consisting of an innovative package of methodologies, tools and good practices all of them transferable to other entities and countries in order to support the implementation of training skills in agreement with the objectives, nature and organisation of the current labour market and in this way increasing employability, especially on women and on those communities most affected by exclusion, discrimination and poverty.
• to contribute, by means of dissemination and technical co-operation, to the generation of capacities in the social actors and also to construct ideas and opinions and to awareness about the necessity and the contributions of the gender mainstreaming for the innovation and the improvement of the quality of the public and institutional policies of training and labour.

This site has been created to share everything which has been learned and achieved about this topics with the purpose of going ahead and be able to share and construct knowledge.

Go to the Model of Policy Graph

To be able to fulfil this purpose, this section has been structured in the following way:

• A synthetic presentation of the subject / area of the problem
• Toolbox: specially created to examine thoroughly in the development and also to share the products and the obtained results. It is organized in: conceptual and methodological materials, didactic developments, strategies and applied experiences, achievements, impacts and learnings.

The Inter-American Centre for Knowledge Development in Vocational Training (ILO/Cinterfor)
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