NN46, September 2011
Towards a New Global World of Skills Development? TVET's turn to Make its Mark
Using a Different Lens to Look at Technical Training
By Enrique Pieck, Universidad Iberoamericana - Ciudad de México
Email: enrique.pieck@uia.mx
Keywords: technical training; TVET in developing countries; job-training.
Summary: The paper argues in favour of a perspective that rescues the nature of the local contexts when assessing the importance of technical training programs.
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Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) in Mexico takes a variety of forms, ranging from non-formal programs to the inclusion of technical courses in junior- and senior-high-school education. The area we want to focus on here is technical training, which is mostly provided by government institutions, and comprises 43 specialist subjects such as computing, electrical installation and repair, dressmaking, secretarial studies, auto mechanics and electronics, taught in 546 training centers located in both rural and urban areas throughout Mexico. The technical courses offered last from 6 months to 2 years and typically have a practical emphasis (i.e. one of learning by doing), being taken by people of different ages, though most of the participants are young people between 15 and 25 years old.
How does one evaluate such programs and gauge their importance? In the context of globalization, evaluation has been affected by international norms and standards based on the prevailing rationalistic, utilitarian logic that places the stress on programs’ impact and efficiency. From this viewpoint, educational quality is conceptually linked to productivity - to the potential of education to achieve higher levels of productivity and insertion into the job market. Currently, people prefer to stress the acquisition and evaluation of competencies rather than place the emphasis on learning processes.
Using this yardstick, technical-training courses may be deemed to produce poor results in terms of their functional efficiency, the competencies that they engender, their low educational level, and the limited job-market access that they achieve. However, we believe that such courses should be analyzed and evaluated from another viewpoint that has more to do with the real circumstances in which they are run. We need to take the nature of the contexts into account, which perforce implies weighing the importance of local factors that inevitably have to do with relevance – i.e. with the extent to which the programs respond to the local environment, to local diversity and to the socio-cultural make-up of the people at whom they are aimed. In this case, we are mainly referring to impoverished regions of developing countries where there is scant educational coverage and often no job-training programs at all.
In our opinion, one may, from this viewpoint, argue in favor of technical training. While possibly agreeing with some of the doubts expressed about these programs -i.e. that they are speedy courses for the poor, that there are too many of them, that they are insufficiently focused, that they have little effect on productivity, produce little income, etc. - we believe that certain other factors need to be taken account in order to reach meaningful conclusions about their importance. Our arguments in this regard are based on information taken from two research projects carried out in recent months in various technical training centers in Mexico. The first of these projects set out to examine the reasons why impoverished young people take these courses and what they see in them, while the second one was aimed at looking at and giving an account of technical training’s meaningful experiences.
Some arguments in favor of such programs are as follows:
- - The courses are, indeed, short and it is precisely this that many people like about them. Being short of money, many young people choose short training courses whereby they can learn a trade that will enable them to find work fast, as exemplified by the words of one young electronics student who said: “This really does enable you to get into the job market straight away.” Other people see rapid training as a way to get a short-term job (albeit a lowly one) so as to earn enough to go on studying, while such short courses are also seen as a good alternative to three years of senior-high-school education.
- - In isolated, marginalized communities, this type of training provides effective job-market-insertion possibilities to an older population that has never had the chance to set foot in a school or received any technical courses within its community. We are talking about women who take courses in dressmaking and hope to open a small dressmaking business, students who, after being given a short cosmetics course, decide to open a beauty parlor in a tiny corner of their house, men who study electronics and start doing small electrical jobs, etc.
- -Many young people find out which vocation they want to pursue while participating in such training courses.
- - This type of education constitutes a training option for young people who leave junior high school without any chance of continuing their studies, or who have no wish to go on to senior high-school.
- - While the courses generally afford access to the lower echelons of the job market, in many cases this access forms a part of labyrinthine journeys towards development, where work and study interweave to produce training paths. Study follows work and work follows study, so that it is common to see young people who study in order to work, or young people who, after working for a time, feel the need for further training in order to gain access to better jobs. One should not underestimate these trajectories made up of training and work -i.e. trajectories of betterment- which arise from students’ participation in job-training programs that oftentimes make surprisingly useful contributions to their professional development. Such programs do not specifically adhere to productive and economic criteria, but are based on another logic that produces unexpected benefits for a sector of the population that sees them as a legitimate training option.
- - People profit from these courses in many different ways: women join together to make clothes, young people repair computers or even go so far as to give the same courses to other members of their communities, people who took a course in confectionary sell cakes in their neighborhoods, young men set up car-repair or metal-working shops, and others immediately find a job so as to earn enough money to go on with their studies.
- - These courses go beyond the mere learning of a trade or skill, also leading to socialization, empowerment, the motivation to set up micro-businesses, interest in going back to school, etc. These things are part of the hidden curriculum inherent in such programs and are generally overlooked at the moment of evaluating them.
Hence we believe that a local yardstick needs to be used when assessing the importance of such programs, offered in such contexts – a different perspective that implies rescuing the cultural heritage of the people involved and getting to know their outlooks and needs before dismissing the training courses provided to them based on external criteria and trying to impose rationalistic modes of thinking and doing. Indeed, the proliferation of homogenizing approaches and emphases hampers the understanding of inner processes and obscures other important socio-cultural factors -such as the meaning and importance that people in such contexts assign to the courses they receive and the part that the latter play in their life strategies- which are inherent in the development of the projects in question.
We cannot end our comments without mentioning a series of factors that need to be considered if we are to enhance the quality of these job-training courses and make it more likely that they will have a greater influence: courses in isolated communities should be longer, institutional links need to be forged in order to extend training opportunities (i.e. jobs, credits and education), the curricula should be enriched, focusing should be a basic operating criterion of such courses, and they should be run more efficiently. Without a doubt, improved quality in this area of job training could lead to increased access to employment, to the creation of local economic and productive alternatives, to the development of more solid professional strategies, and to enhance the way in which low-income populations ultimately see and assign meaning to such courses. Indeed, these things are happening in some places and one can only imagine what might be achieved if more support were made available and more strategic training approaches were developed.
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Cite article as: Pieck, E., (2011) ‘Using a Different Lens to Look at Technical Training’, in NORRAG NEWS, Towards a New Global World of Skills Development? TVET's turn to Make its Mark, No.46, September 2011, pp. 32-35, available: http://www.norrag.org
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