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The Occupational Project

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The focus on the person and his/her context as a governing criterion of the training policies is the basis of the mainstreaming of gender perspective and the adoption of competency-based training as a conceptual and methodological framework of the training policies. As from this reference framework and through several and cumulative application experiences, the FORMUJER Programme was able to conceptualize and develop the Occupational Project device as the most adequate and effective didactic procedure to strengthen employability and equity.

Toolbox >> Conceptual materials >> Teaching materials

The experiences carried out within the FORMUJER framework have shown that people strengthen their employability and the exercise of their role as citizens when: they are capable of conjugating their capabilities, needs and knowledge with the competencies required by the occupational context; they are recognised as creators of their future, identifying skills, desires, possibilities and difficulties to make their own way. Therefore, it is through the support and the strengthening of people to define and manage a feasible training project and the employment of training policies that we will be improving employability as well as the greatest challenge of the contemporary world: the increase of decent work. To this aim, specific Guidance and technical training actions must be co-ordinated. Work with a project creating strategy involves the different protagonists of this process in various ways. For participants This is the action plan, the set of activities which they define, plan, execute, revise and re-plan with a view to building their training path, achieving productive insertion and/or improving their employment situation. It fosters the essential role in the training and entry into working life process. For instructors It is a didactic methodology for assisting people in building training and work itineraries, developing key employability competencies and diversifying professional options. For curriculum development and training policies. This is the axis of the teaching-learning process, a strategy for personalization and flexibilisation of training, to strengthen its role as an agent for change. The OP guides and personalises training since it makes people build their professional path as from the combination of their competencies and needs with those required by the context, the assessment of the competencies they posses and those they lack, the identification of the gender marks, etc. Likewise, it fosters the exercise of citizenship since it promotes the development of autonomy, the establishment of relationships with others and the access to the public world. As a strategy, the OP relies on the human capacity to create projects: It appears in order to cater for specific needs; through it an assessment of the starting situation is made and acted upon in order to modify the same. The situations which need to be modified, which have to be acted upon are -for example- recent or long standing unemployment, the need to increase the personal or family income, the desire to improve the present and future situation as regards work, that is, the need and the desire to improve employability. It co-ordinates the problem which needs to be solved with the possible way to do so. When it is time to start doing so, the specific time and the available resources to do so must be considered. Therefore, according to the OP methodology, people go along a route, supported and strengthened by the training or guidance. The starting point is acknowledging the situation of the subject who will build her/his OP as regards employment, and such situation has many points in common with that of her/his peers, but also many differences, possibilities and restraints which must be acknowledged and dealt with in order to change or tackle the same. It is always set within a social and historical context which influences its definition and development. Therefore, the methodology developed makes people analyse the productive context, the natural or other types of resources which may become opportunities for improving their labour situation, as well as the actual possibilities of the labour market in such context and the requirements thereof. It becomes a tool for change and the empowerment of women and men. When people acknowledge the distance between the know-how and competencies they already possess and those they need in order to work in a specific field, they are better qualified to choose their training paths or manage a job as from this awareness, and therefore, plan their activities and timing and foresee what resources they need to achieve the same. They may resort to the different training offer "windows" and choose among those which are more effective or necessary to improve their occupational situation. It implies a dynamic and open process and therefore includes assessment or monitoring in order to revise the setting up, carry out adjustments or modify aspects of the implementation thereof. The OP may be re-planned and adjusted to the life situation of whoever carries out the same. In the same way as all action plans, it is developed in different stages: STAGES Competencies to be developed Stage Description The self assessment Where do I start from? Defining and describing the starting situation as regards employability, integrating the persons' particular features (those deriving from their position according to gender, class, labour and ethnical identity, age, urban or rural life, among others) Self assessment Acknowledgement of the self Context analysis: Acknowledgement of the market's needs or of opportunities for productive activities Defining aims and strategies for its feasibility What do I want to achieve? Defining the aims to be achieved and designing strategies according to the personal situation and the productive context. Aims: At the short, middle and long term Definition and planning of activities How am I going to do it? Planning the activities incorporating schedules, required resources, follow up modality and organisation thereof. Possible ways: Priorities, schedules, resources, family organisation, opportunities, risks Revition and monitoring How I go and what I obtained? To reflect critically on the process, to anticipate risks and of finding alternatives of solution of problems arisen in the route.   The OP is personal and individual but it can also be collective since it includes the strength of the competence of undertaking while it promotes the coordination of efforts and resources for the creation of integration alternatives. Thus, it constitutes and evolves in a potent methodology for the design of policies for employment, of policies to struggle against poverty and for approaching the issue of informal economy. This has been one of the most important pieces of learning and achievements since their implementation within the framework of FORMUJER and PROIMUJER. Within the framework of employment recession and uncertainty, the formulation of collective Projects in order to develop micro-entrepreneurial activities was accepted with an intensity unforeseen in all countries and it imposed the necessity to enlarge the scope of the intervention in order to not only incorporate the specific technical training but, also in the most beneficial and advantageous way, the adoption of a wide and flexible menu of strategies and resources to solve the practical stage of the vocational training and also to attend to the requirements of the occupational projects of the beneficiaries. To support and to promote the OP of their own population targets is in a way considered a challenge and, if as such taken, then it evolves into a new reason d'etre for vocational training institutions. Otherwise, the fact of adopting the methodology of OP innovates and improves the quality and relevance of the policies and it also impels the re-formulation of the Institutional Project for Intervention. As an example: Curriculum development must incorporate the expectations and necessities of the participants, pedagogic strategies and of leveling to the type of population, to make flexible entrances and exits, define entrance relevant requirements, develop in the population the competences to make use of the technical information services and management necessary to take ahead its project, etc. Hence the proposal of placing the OP on the point of confluence between the objectives and the practice of the vocational training and of the intervention approach and the association among OP, innovation, quality improvement, relevance and equity in the training policies. The main products and results reached with this methodologies on Formujer and Proimujer Programmes appear in the Toolbox. Also a greater detail on the implementation strategies applied and the impacts obtained in each one of the participant countries is in the publication: A Training Policy Model for Enhancing Employability and gender equity: The Formujer Programme. 2004.

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