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Vocational and occupational guidance

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The demands of new personal competences, mainly behavioural and technical, tending to improve working performance in dependent positions as well as independent jobs - and the growing significance of those kinds of working relations considered until recently as "unusual" type of working practices (working at home - part-time work, contracts to term, e-working, etc,) require to approach the person in a integral way and to strengthen its protagonism within employment, training and community processes. It aims to put the approach on the person conceived as an integral being which can only be done by recognizing its character of "located and conditional". A concept of person as a result of a intersection of multiple axis: gender, ethnos, social class, occupational situation, urban or rural insertion as well as their own history, family and community incidence, etc. And involved in a classification system and hierarchical structuring of the people, who are social and historical and base an unequal access to the resources and goods of the development as well as a hierarchized valuation of their competences and skills.

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Therefore, employability and citizenship competences have a relational, contextual and dynamic character. Relational and contextual because employablity implies the interaction of the person in the labour context, in the relationships that they create when acting within specific productive, labour and social contexts. Therefore, employability cannot be defined in an universal way, neither can it be tried as an individual phenomenon, but rather it must be considered as a concept "located" with personal, social and temporary marks. It is considered to be dynamic, because the competences and knowledge to be developed can no longer be limited to a specific position and for the whole lifetime. The high percentage of labour mobility implies the necessity to generate the conditions that will allow people to perform within a wide occupational space and also under situations of both current employment and unemployment. This means a challenge for the training process since it will have to encompass and connect all different areas and strategies of attention placing them at the service of the target population. Besides all this should be done during the previous training stages, along full training period and also at post-training stages so as to ensure achieving the ultimate objective: that of obtaining greater opportunities for the people. This mean to guide, train and advance and to move up together with the people in such a manner that they can construct attainable personal projects for the acquisition of those competencies that will allow them to access the labour market and, thus, will have helped them to overcome or to be able to transform an unfavourable starting point, by simply applying subjective conditionings and nurturing from the context and so to achieve a better package of acquired competencies which will enable them to climb up within the job market arena. This is the main role to be played by " Information and Vocational Guidance" whose purpose it is to discover and develop competences and skills on trainees so that, together with the labour market demands, they are informed and they reflect to make their own decisions which will take them towards an active, productive and satisfactory life. Therefore, it is the Vocational Guidance sole responsibility to follow up / accompany and to encourage the target population: from the moment when they get in contact with the training entity to offer them support in selecting the most adequate vocational option, information on the labour market and, mainly, on the conditions and possibilities offered by each one of the different training profiles; during the training development, to furnish them with all the knowledge concerning the world of work and also the behavioural and cultural rules governing it, including the kind of support needed to turn the labour methods into feasible practices; at the end, to offer them appropriate instruments to assist during the search either for a dependent job, or for the self-management of their own employment, or for the association with other parties to engage in productive activities (micro enterprises, co-operatives, etc.) and the corresponding follow-up of all these processes, specially during the incorporation to the job market and onward. This follow-up is, also, an input for the same training institutions in the sense that it allows for the evaluation of the quality and relevancy of the training processes being offered and also to gather all pertaining information to keep them permanently current and upgraded. Therefore, it is crucial to incorporate the gender perspective to this project since it allows to approach people, in an integral way taking into account their own environment and history, their own characteristics as well as their personal and relational competencies. Also, by including the gender perspective we are also contributing to promote those necessary fundamental bases within the training policies which will - in turn - bring forth vocational diversification in training, assistance in fighting against segmentation and, by means of dialogue with the productive sector as well as the good offices of the "Labour Intermediation Services", to increase women integration, many times blocked by stereotyping labels or simply by ignorance. This appraisement of the Vocational Guidance from a systemic conception of policy, allows for understanding it as a basic component integrated to the teaching-learning process (instead of an additional service that performed at random). Vocational Guidance: It is a learning instance, by itself determining factor for the improvement of gender equity; it is also a structure - lending mechanism interacting through all the different components within the teaching-learning processes, connecting all those specific technical training areas with those suitable training keys most necessary to be able solve in a capable, reflective, flexible and also with autonomy, all pertaining questions regarding the planning and scheduling their own work; when adopting the gender perspective, it evolves into a powerful tool, contributing to the bringing down of stereotyping labels and occupational segmentation through a proactive attitude leading and encouraging to change by "neutralising" the vocational options, and thus allowing to gain ground towards the equality of opportunities. Therefore, it has to interact and to be complemented by all other available other components., such as: Articulation with the setting to process their requirements to be able to guide the occupational projects of people. To turn Vocational guidance into a successful tool it is first needed to have all available information, both quantitative as well as qualitative, on the economic and social context where our target segments lead their normal life. Curricular development: mainly needed for training as well as for those competence based approach techniques aiming to integration at general level as well as covering also those that by requiring a more specific kind of knowledge be present in the candidates' profile, have to be helped and reinforced by the most appropriate didactic methodologies; Monitoring, evaluation, systematisation and dissemination to orchestrate the follow-up procedures so that the population is able to reaching and get feed-back data from said policies thus improving their chances: Communication strategy so as to better face the diffusion of the labour market offer, the right kind of convocation and the student / training population chances of incorporation. Also to offer encouragement towards taking a more proactive attitude in the promotion of the occupational diversification ahead, in order to better struggle against discrimination and elimination of both stereotypes and barriers. Compensatory strategies to face the existing disparities and inequities, to assist in alleviating the necessities and people's singularities, by way of making use of them as part of didactic methodology contributing towards strengthening of: self-esteem, autonomy, decision-making skills but most of all to be applied in the revision and overcoming of all gender marks connotations. This has been the guideline developed by FORMUJER and one of the group's most outstanding and acknowledged contribution to both: quality as well as methodological innovation within vocational training. The efforts to orchestrate these different approaches, led to the following action lines: to conceptualise and to promote the development of a System of Information and Vocational Guidance integrated to the Labour Market System of Offers and Demands which makes of it a valid and unique system for the management of available information. The System of Information and Vocational Guidance (project) is defined as an essential supporting service mainly to achieve that trainees, especially women currently living under conditions of vulnerability and poverty are employed, which means they should be considered as "suitable candidates for employment". That is one of the main reasons of the project considering and expressly addressing the gender differences in regards to the ability to create a self-employment project as an alternative choice for vocational training as well as for the different possibilities of employability affecting both men and women. Thus it evolves and becomes a different instrument that include the right kind of tool to overcome those stereotyping labels and wrong concepts not only still governing our cultures but also present within the group of indicators guiding everyday life. This is the reason why the instrumentation of this tool has been gathering relevance since it will assist in the definition of all necessary technical specifications to be supplied by PC backup and also for the strategic methodologies to be developed by the Guidance Supporting Work. The application of the diverse strategies and materials has been made available within the contents of the Occupational Project. to develop the methodology for each project, and more concretely, the Occupational Project a specially designed devise, created after deep processes of revision and reflection on the meaning given to: employability opportunities, citizenship and gender factor as perceived from the people's point of view and within its context. As it is visualised in the Model of policies the Occupational Project constitutes "the meeting point" where all different points of training get together (to deepen and participate in the specific development of a specific item.) Summarising, if we understand training to be a meeting point between the labour market and people, Vocational Guidance, the Compensatory Strategies and the Occupational Project represent the inclusion of people in their protagonists roles within the training process and as persons with its singularities and differences.