Vocational Technical Journeys (TTP) - Argentina

Source: ILO/CINTERFOR

In Argentina a reform of technical education was begun in 1996, that has resulted in the orchestration of the so-called "Trayectos Técnicos Profesionales" (Vocational Technical Journeys) (TTP) which are offers of training of an optional nature for all students or graduates of polymodal education. Its function is to train technicians in specific occupational areas the complexity of which requires a thourough grasp of professional competencies that can only be developed through systematic and prolonged training processes. The design itself of the TTP’s is an interesting and timely example of the search for integration among the various educational and training systems:

• With polymodal education, because the latter is a set of training alternatives aimed at large fields of knowledge and of social and productive action (in a total of five areas), and the election of which allows students to consolidate fundamental competencies in those areas in function of issues linked to their interests and motivations: through the TTP’s they access a different and additional option. We are dealing, in this latter case, with vocational initiation through training that prepares the trainee to perform in certain occupational areas that require a thourough grasp of specific technological and vocational competencies.

• With vocational training, because the TTP’s complement a supply which arose, in Argentina, to target the development of the competencies required to perform in certain occupations and/or as a component of active employment policies aimed at promoting entry of groups with specific needs into the labour and social environments.

• With life-long and higher training, given that the function of the TTP’s is to introduce the students into a vocational journey, guaranteeing their access to a base of vocational knowledge and abilities that allows them to begin working in a first job within a certain vocational field and to continue to learn during all their active life. What is then sought is that the training provided through the TTP’s be supplemented with other educational alternatives in order to allow further levels of development, specification, re-orientation and -possibly- re-conversion of the initial vocation.