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The role of vocational training in the transition towards a knowledge society.
Tecnia. San José, Costa Rica, INA. v.4, no. 11. May-Aug.2003

 

Editorial

To deal with the globalised market that has nowadays extended all over the world, vocational training will have to emphasise the development of knowledge, guiding trainees toward the acquisition of more cognitive skills, and will have to adopt a positive and open stance regarding entrepreneurial self-management.

Latin American countries have changed their marketing and production strategies, both in the agricultural and technological spheres. This transformation is in fact a reaction to the unpredictable changes of current markets. Something similar should be pointed out if we refer to the adoption of policies and laws adopted in pursuit of the same objective. The trend is towards turning out limited series of heterogeneous products yielding more added value, instead of the massive production of large series of homogeneous items. Competition is steeper in such a context due to the demands of consumers regarding price, quality, delivery and design. Public Administrations must also respond to the same parameters of efficiency, quality and effectiveness. In that respect, our country has been adopting a number of regulations to offer greater protection of consumers and users of public services, like the Law for Consumer Protection and the Law for the Protection of Citizens from an Excess of Requirements and Administrative Obligations, among others.

Employment is moving from the stability of specific work-posts towards stability within enterprises; the predominant tendency is towards polyvalent skills and competencies in human resources. Indeterminate contracting in collective agreements results in an increasing number of labour contracts while the hallmark now is lack of stability, temporariness, seasonality and even insecurity.

The tasks assigned to the different work-posts are no longer invariable; they have become indefinite. Workers are obliged to move from one department to another or to rotate according to the needs of the organisation, or to work in several occupations within the enterprise, covering production and productivity aspects. In short: human resources have to be multi-functional.

The new paradigm has generated processes stemming from productive restructuring and reorganisation, structural adjustment programmes, new rules for national and international competition, technological changes, new schemes of competitiveness and attention to customers, and very specially, the correct use of time in the delivery of services.

All the above makes it necessary for human resources to have better general training, with a special stress on knowledge. It also requires workers to be poly-functional and autonomous in decision-making and better equipped to produce, not only specific goods, but whole clusters of items, and to move vertically and horizontally within enterprises. Consequently, persons need to be able to adapt to the various occupational areas, to join teams and lead them. Example of this are the requirements of hotel chains, that lay stress on human resources trained in various occupations (electricity, refrigeration, industrial maintenance, etc.).

In this context, education and vocational training in Costa Rica should respond to the transformations occurring in the production of goods and services. In view of technological changes, non-conventional training modes have been adopted, among them distance education, teleconferencing, interactive and personalised virtual teaching, multi-media, virtual laboratories and so forth, that offer new possibilities of training.

Educational institutions should turn out greater numbers of entrepreneurs (for small, micro and medium sized firms) capable of promoting significant changes in production and in the economy in general. For that reason, the National Training Institute (INA) is trying to bolster up its programmes of business management, commercial English, corporate computer systems, product design and differentiation, in order to generate sustainability and competitiveness advantages through talents, creativity, skills and knowledge. Education and training can do much to improve the earnings and life-styles of the informal sector when they go hand in hand with other measures to improve productivity, safety, and product quality. The great challenge is how to deliver education and training programmes so as to reach entrepreneurs and workers in general effectively.

The best way to generate employment is, first of all, to train persons responding to the specific demands of employers, enterprises and society. Persons well grounded in occupational competencies as an ideal mechanism to obtain the new work-posts required by those joining labour markets for the first time, or by those wishing to get retrained to perform in new work-posts.

A second and very important element is to provide a basis of sound general education, as both societies, entrepreneurs and enterprises require higher degrees of qualification than they used to in their new personnel. A current practice is to ask for ninth year or complete secondary studies for admission to most jobs. For that reason INA recently adopted the programme of the Universidad para el Trabajo (Labour University). The idea is that public universities and colleges may enable INA graduates to continue their higher studies through a system of coordination, homologation and recognition of programmes, study plans or other academic activities.

The development of such a system will require the participation of many internal and external actors, taking into account all social, political and economic sectors as well as the Public Administration itself. The common aim is improving the quality of life of men and women workers all over the country.

Lic. Jorge Córdoba Ortega
Technical Assistant Manager

INA (Instituto Nacional de Aprendizaje) (National Training Institute).
E.-MAIL: subgerencia_tecnica@ina.ac.cr
Web site of the National Training Institute (INA): www.ina.ac.cr

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