INTRODUCTION TO THE THEMATIC CONTENTS

FOUR KEY FACTORS IN VOCATIONAL TRAINING AND VARIOUS ASSOCIATED AFFIRMATIONS.

By: Fernando Vargas Zúñiga
Cinterfor/ILO Consultant

The training scene in Latin America and the Caribbean, -after its initial configuration in the fifties, typical of countries with models of endogenous growth- shows nowadays, in a context of openness and total redimensioning of State functions, a wide degree of variety in the forms of delivery and a greater complexity in the demands for competent workers in the midst of accelerated economic and social transformations.

There are various critical factors of vocational training that now can be identified in the region. After an initial institutional design based on the response generated from a single identity linked to the State, now the forms of attention to demands have diversified and deepened. The offer covers more and more institutional forms and initiatives promoted from different fronts. As far as they are concerned, the demands are wider, covering more occupational sectors and contain greater demands in abilities, skills, attitudes and knowledge.

Diversity and depth, marked in widening coverage, seem to be better descriptors of the change occurring in different facets of training. The increased diversity becomes evident in the incorporation of new possible modalities, new sectors, new institutional forms and new sources of financing. The greater depth refers to a denser content of variables such as the organization of labor, the new demands of occupations, the participation of new actors, local management, sectoral management and the concern over quality.

The intensification of the demand has demanded and produced reactions in the offer. More initiatives are now registered in the training offer; they have widened and complimented what was before an only response from national organizations and have put in play new financing schemes. Fresh resources were injected, with different institutional arrangements; the greater demands and the new institutional designs questioned the centralized administration system producing interesting schemes of local management and sectoral management.

Additionally, the diversity in offers and the increased concern for the contribution of human talent in productivity have begun to configure the concern over the issue of quality, in training actions as well as in institutional management. Finally, the need to innovate in training has been accentuated the diversification and deepening of demands; therefor, the results of research acquire importance as a basic factor to grant pertinence and actuality to training.

The financing of vocational training: From "one man pays" to "all put in".

Who should pay for the training? This is the question behind the posing of this critical factor. From a basic concept, in which the financing was achieved creating tax structures upon the base salary, we have gone to new models with different modalities and logic.

Diversification in the sources of financing was pressed for together with adjustments in economies carried out by almost all the countries of the region during the seventies and eighties. The conceptual paradigm on the role of States evolved from intervention and omnipresence to facilitation and the creation of conditions. That change also involved vocational training: going from being considered a public service to being seem as up for compromises; from a exclusive concern of the State to now fitting in the typical functioning of the laws of the market.

In some occasions the volume of resources that they manage to handle upon the basis of contributions applied to net salaries have awakened a boundless political interest for vocational training institutions which, in the long run, effect their stability. In the critical conditions of many Latin American economies, the means of financing are confronted with the unpopularity inherent to taxes and to this extent exacerbate the discussion over the efficiency of institutions that are financed with schemes of fiscal collection.

The answer to the question: "Who should pay?" changed, as likewise did the answer to the question: Who should vocational training favor? If it favors the enterprise, where the worker applies their abilities developed in the training, then this should pay; if it favors the worker who by way of the training improve their income and employability, then he or she should pay; and if it favors the economy as a whole, through improved competitiveness that will allow the country better levels of employment and income and therefor well-being, then the State should pay.

Guided by this last form of reasoning, the State has intervened in training putting up resources with a logic different than that of investing in institutions. It has to buy infrastructure to buy products; it no longer invests to thicken "institutional budgets" but to buy training in the form of "courses", "students" and "hours of training" pointed at alleviating problems of structural unemployment. Many experiences guided by the Ministries of Labor obey this tendency; for example in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. On occasions these fresh funds come from credits from development banks and, in others, from resources of the national budgets. There are very few countries in the region that have not implemented (from credit resources and even national budgets) programs concerned with the contracting of training actions from private institutions that compete to win bids of this type.

Also the State has applied financing measures to motivate training under modalities of fiscal incentives like in the case of the tributary exemption of Chile or the fiscal credit of Argentina. Also applied in some countries, like Colombia and Brazil, is the financing logic according to which enterprises should pay for training, but if they demonstrate that they incur acceptable expenses, these will be deducted or returned from their final liquidation.

The private sector, encouraged by the fresh sources coming from the ministries of labor and by a market showing a clear imbalance of unsatisfied demand, also makes itself present, widening the training offer. Much of this   imbalance comes from the funnel created by the inadequate quantitative and qualitative relation in the transition from elementary to middle education. Inadequate not only in the pedagogical prescription it had, but also because it ignored the relation with the working world, for the existence of schools that do not go to enterprise and youth that abandon the education under pressure to obtain some source of income.

In the past twenty years, all kinds of private training institutions have appeared, with such a speed that Cinterfor called it the "explosion" of the private offer. To show just some indicators, in Brazil PLANFOR has registered almost 16,000 institutions; in Colombia it is estimated that some 400 private training entities exist; in El Salvador a proportion of the training of INSAFORP is contracted through some 60 collaborating centers; a good part of the training that INFOTEP does, in the Dominican Republic, is in the hands of private institutions.

In many cases such institutions are closely linked with unions, syndicates or business chambers; in others, they were formed due to the inadequate responses of public institutions. In summary, nowadays we count with good examples of sectoral management of training; just to mention some, in sectors such as construction (Chile and Mexico), the graphic industry (Argentina), plastics (Colombia), transportation (Brazil). But in addition, there are cases that were not more than a good way of attending to the unsatisfied demand, whose quality is not always as needed.

Furthermore, international cooperation has financed the growth of training experiences. Large institutions have received cooperation; many training centers throughout the region carry the names of the collaborating countries.
Now many private institutions also receive cooperation. In many occasions, entrepreneurial chambers have been more agile at soliciting and convincing of their needs to cooperators and that the best form of attention was outside the traditional training institutions.

The financing on the part of training program participants has also growth; because the private institutions, lacking a large volume of income, couldn't train for free and because free social support experiences of the sixties and seventies demonstrated that a basis of compromise is required, through a paid price, to value what is acquired and therefor not abandon the training. The problem of access subsists for those who can not pay for the training; in this case what continues to be necessary is the presence of sources of support and an action in favor of equity with resources arbitrated by the State.

To the extent in which the funds for training grow and diversify, the discussion about the impact achieved with such funds takes off. Techniques of economic and social evaluation have been applied since the seventies with the intention of prioritizing and selecting good, regular and poor projects; the results were used both to assign resources and to expose inefficient programs.

New financing mechanisms demand clearer measures of the return on investments, above all in scenes of more complex labor interaction. Before financing one wants to know: What is the return on the investment? How do we quantify all the benefits? What alternatives can be designed to optimize the funds? How do we include in the evaluation all the benefits, especially the qualitative ones?

The equation in the financing of training continues showing a coverage, that for Latin America, is not greater than 10% of its economically active population. The deficit can require more funds for more participants; but also more participants with the same funds. This other question can depend a lot on the management and the educational innovations; here we have a new critical aspect.

Local management and sectoral management: greater flexibility and more compromise with regard to the organizational forms. typical of large institutions, they administered themselves usually with highly centralized schemes, with inertial budgetary distribution systems where the large got perpetuated as large and the small as small.

The structures of a good part of the institutions came close to the logic of the government administration in effect at the time. So then, the centralization in the decisions and in the attributions, was for a long time the paradigm of efficient and controlled administration.

The concept of growth was often handled as a synonym for the widening of infrastructure. In this way, the installations that emerged in the big urban centers demanded greater and greater volumes of resources for their operation. Simultaneously, the demands coming from less-developed regions or in incipient economic sectors, receive resources proportional to their relative size and, also, do not make available autonomous mechanisms of local management.

The arrival of unseen actors in vocational training, the greater variety of financial resources and the multiple reforms in the subject of political-administrative decentralization adopted by countries of the region, made it such that many institutions were pressured to modify the logic for the division of managerial, administrative and operative attributions.

In the same sense, the greater participation of citizens and training agents in local life made the criteria of management evolve and facilitated reforms aimed at decentralization in training. Progressively, the reforms in the institutions gave greater management capacity to their operative dependencies: the training centers. They were granted the capacity to plan, administer and evaluate their actions. Mechanisms were implemented to guarantee the participation of local actors, enterprises, workers, educational sector and government.

Also the provision of new resources from the ministries of labor -and at times from the development bank and the cooperation agencies- facilitated the apparition, growth and consolidation of experiences of local management in training, often coming from sectors of economic activity clearly related with local industry.

A good number of NGOs receiving credits conducted training, in the same manner as organizations of entrepreneurs and workers. Not long ago, in a vocational training congress held in Brasilia, the Ministry of Labor brought together training experiences in a variety that ranged from high technology of electric distribution in Paraná to the hand fabrication of food from typical fruits in the Amazons.

Local management of training gives users a sense of belonging and relation with the results that redound to greater compromise with the programs. It improves the flexibility of responses upon bringing them much closer to the demand, and it guarantees a more adequate distribution of the benefits obtained from applied funds. Similar characteristics can be seen from training managed by sector. Entrepreneurs of dedicated sectors involve themselves in the financing, the modernization of programs, in the employment of graduates and in the maintenance of competitive levels.

In the same manner as vocational training does not respond any more to a static booklet of technologies of days
gone by, nor the disappearing stability of organizational structures, the managerial structure for training does not
respond to the logic of centralization.


Quality and quality management, two sides of a single coin.

A wide margin of demands for training can be observed and, at the same time, a greater disposability of institutions. Users have increasing ability to select among different offers, and the variety of public and private alternatives, makes up a range of options for their training.

Choose the best option: that which offers a superior result in training, the one which most closely pertains to the market, and which requires signs of information that provide transparency to the decisions. Currently the information in hands of the training applicants is very imperfect; it comes with "clichés" and archetypes constructed upon the professions or the prestige of one institution or another.

Those who can not gain access to a highly reputed institution, should settle with the offer most on hand -or that which they can pay- and later move into the market with a credits whose acceptance will be similar to the prestige of the institution that grants them.

The concern of the State and some institutions is progressively directed towards the assurance of good levels of quality in training more than the guarantee of training itself. The private sector poses many training offers; seeing to it that their level of quality is as needed, is one of the functions the State should now fulfill in its relation of social responsibility with training.

In the current training scene, with a deficit of attention to the demand, many private and public offers prosper being good and bad. Without mechanisms of assurance of the quality achieved -measured by indicators like job insertion, mobility, the improvement of income- the bad can pass themselves off as good and the good can remain without a recognition that stimulates their reproduction.

The systems of quality assurance that have been extended to industry, are beginning in a yet incipient manner and cover training activities as guides for users to know the type of institutions that exist and what their results are.

But also the quality of the training, curricular and academic, characterized by the greater availability of programs, trained instructors and adequate workshops and classrooms, is a movement that has been registered in some institutions.

The concern for the quality of institutions and of graduates allows for a concept of certification in three vectors: that of the accreditation of products, that of the certification of processes (ISO) and that of the certification of competence (in people); based on the utilization of standards created through real working conditions, reinvestments in curricular design, training and the posterior certification.

This coin has two sided in the quality of training; one, seen as the verification and applied to different processes: selection, curricular adequation, the training of instructors, the training delivered; another is quality as an indicator of impact in training, in the insertion of workers in the market, in labor mobility and in the concern for the certification effectively granted which guarantees its owner the required competence level


Research: of great potential for innovation in training.

The search for new and better ways of developing vocational training was a labor that -as is now recognized- was efficiently fulfilled by vocational training institutions. Institutional capacities like their curricular design, their training programs and their methodologies of attention... part of the corresponding know how was seen as the greatest of advantages in their action. However, now there are few institutions that develop research processes for vocational training. The immediate pressure of responses to growing demands can, on some occasions, distract the planning and implementation of investigative activities.

The value of research as a possibility of validating institutional strengths is high. Research is made possible by a strength presented by institutions: their disposability of human and financial resources; at the same time, they proportion the appreciable capacity to develop new products like diagnostics of change in the entrepreneurial setting, new plans and programs, new pedagogical strategies, new modes of training, etc.

Research has a wide range of possibilities related with vocational training; a rapid categorization, which does not pretend in any way to be exhaustive, allows a person to identify various sources:

Economic and social research on labor markets and the evolution of sectors to learn about the variation in indicators of sectoral activity, the incorporation of new technologies, new forms of organization, the implications between sectoral development and vocational training, etc. In this field the high dosage of economic methodologies that in the eighties strengthened the development of models to predict necessities has been surpassed and advances have been made toward the description of organizational models, the mechanisms of organizational growth and learning, the incorporation and development of technologies, among others.

Occupational research about the configuration of jobs, their evolution, similarities, classification criteria. To recognize the demands derived from the organization of labor, it is necessary to go into the different sectors beyond their mere evolution and to analyze the new competencies required, the transformation of the job composition, the demands for re-qualification and updating of workers, etc.

Educational and pedagogical research related with the basic concepts of how one learns, the most adequate methodologies for learning and innovation in the means of delivery of training. Its principal purpose points at innovating in education, generating forms of training that reach more workers, with greater probabilities of success in their results.

However, as with the execution of training actions, obtaining better products of investigation requires a good grade of decentralization. Training institutions perhaps can achieve better results if, instead of developing all the investigation on their own; they put themselves to the task of creating networks and facilitating exchanges in a national and regional horizon. The interest for research in training is growing among non-institutional opportunities; for example, post-graduate work on occupational evolution has been on the rise, along with other topics associated with training.

The role of research networks as agents of dissemination, spreading information, must be recognized. It is no longer required that researchers concentrate themselves in same place; probably it is necessary to concentrate research efforts. the Networking facilitates the identification of topics, projects and the publishing of results.

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