Opportunities and obstacles to promoting a new vocational training model.
Our country continues to have one of the
highest unemployment rates in the European Union, especially regarding the youth population. This structural problem coexists with the fact that many business sectors are unable to fill their vacancies. These unfilled vacancies are particularly high at intermediate qualification levels—those linked to vocational training—and in industrial sectors most related to technological change. One of the reasons for this mismatch between labor supply and demand is the lack of effective and prestigious vocational training.
Let us compare the educational level of our country with that of the European Union. In our country, a high
rate of early school leaving coexists with a high level of
over-qualification in relation to labor market needs, while the intermediate qualification level is underrepresented. In contrast, in the rest of the European Union, the intermediate level is predominant. The following graph is revealing.
At the same time, the weight of continuous training for the active population is significantly lower than that established by various prospective studies and that of other European Union countries:
40% of companies with more than 5 employees do not offer them any type of training.
Well, the roadmap to respond to this delicate situation is the
Organic Law on the Organization and Integration of Vocational Training and the regulations that implement it.
Broadly speaking, this regulatory change establishes the following measures:
- It organizes, integrates, and regulates the entire vocational training offer into a single system. In other words, from now on we will no longer speak of formal and non-formal training: we will speak of vocational training.
- It establishes five levels of training offers: partial competency accreditation, competency certificate, professional certificate, training cycle, and specialization course.
- It generalizes the dual nature of vocational training, alternating classroom training with professional practice at the workplace, sharing responsibility between training centers and companies.
- It regulates and promotes the accreditation of competencies acquired through professional experience or non-formal pathways.
- It creates and regulates the vocational guidance system linked to vocational training to accompany students throughout their professional careers.
- It incorporates key transversal aspects such as innovation, entrepreneurship, and internationalization into vocational training.
- It defines the governance and quality evaluation systems.
The objectives are appropriate: many of these measures have been widely demanded and agreed upon by different sectors of society.
However, implementation will not be easy. Some of the
difficulties will be:
- Firstly, the excessively regulatory nature of the law stands out. This excess of regulation will lead to difficulty in adapting to changes in the needs of productive sectors, which nowadays occur at a breakneck pace.
- Secondly, it will take time to generalize the dual nature of training: many companies do not invest in the training of their workers, and we cannot expect them to host students in alternating programs on a massive scale while assuming new labor costs. Furthermore, they often lack qualified personnel to tutor the learning processes.
- Finally, the new regulatory framework does not establish significant changes to guarantee the effective implementation of a culture of innovation, entrepreneurship, and internationalization in vocational training centers.
Despite everything,
Autoocupació embarks on this new stage with enthusiasm. We will continue to advocate for the delivery of quality vocational training, adapting official curricula to the needs of productive sectors, promoting dual training in companies, and fostering innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit. And always, by putting people at the center of our actions, so they can pursue their vocation and say, with pride,
I am what I want to be!
