Report of activities Cinterfor/ILO 2001-2002

REPORT OF ACTIVITIES CINTERFOR/ILO
2001-2002

I. PREFACE

The present document embodies the Report that Cinterfor/ILO has prepared for analysis and discussion at the 36th Meeting of the Technical Committee (La Antigua, Guatemala, 28 – 31 July, 2003).

This Report is divided into three parts. A Foreword, briefly describing the main developments in the field of vocational training in the Region of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as an overall view of the Centre’s action in the last two years. This is followed by a detailed account of the activities carried out during the 2001-2002 biennium and up to June 2003. The Report ends with the proposals for policies and action programme that the Centre submits to the consideration of the Member States of the Americas gathered at this 36th Meeting of the Technical Committee.

“Training and the development of workers’ skills and competencies is a crucial dimension of decent work. Economic interests, social imperatives and
the right of working persons to dignity –all of them inherent in the notion
of decent work– come together in it in a more evident manner than elsewhere. For that reason, vocational training has special prominence on the ILO agenda.”

Juan Somavía
Director General - ILO

One of the most systematic practices of vocational training institutions is to face the world in which they have to take action. The historical development of vocational training in Latin America and the Caribbean clearly demonstrate an updating culture with transforming aims. Institutional changes, methodological adjustment, technological advances and conceptual reformulations are only clearly grasped if they are considered in the understanding of a reality which has to be fully comprehended in order to admit a transforming action. Thus, it is not merely a question of adjusting. Social and economic progress is always the target of vocational training institutions. But the efficient accomplishment of such goals is done in the context of a tight relationship with reality.

The persistence and validity of American vocational training institutions can only be understood by the existence of such institutional culture. This validity is not only achieved by its formal existence but by a constant and long-lasting confirmation of their abilities as critical interpreters of their societies and the world’s social and productive reality and as motivators of their development.

Such interpretative exercise has always been a challenge but doing it properly in today’s world is even much more complex. In the past, the valid developmental strategies, commercially speaking, settled more limited boundaries than today’s strategies and therefore it was possible to carry out an analysis with fewer variables and with many more factors under control. Nowadays, the fact that we live in a globalized world has become commonplace. However, it is not usually assumed as a whole and it is even less usual to believe it is possible to act not in a reactive or defensive way but in a propositional sense.

The first and most evident trend within this globalizing logic was seen in the financial field. Favoured as they were by technological advances in terms of the flow of information and the development of communications, though never caused by them, financial capitals are moved around the world causing booms and declines in enterprises, sectors, countries and regions. A significant part of this productive, labour and political uncertainty is stemmed from this globalisation mode.

Vocational training institutions, that were so used to monitor technological changes and transforming tendencies in the ways of organizing, managing and conducting the work and its contents as a way of focusing their actions, are now suddenly overwhelmed by certain factors not particularly connected with the culture of work and production which can have far-reaching consequences in economies, labour markets and people. This would not be so dramatic but for the frequent arising demands that vocational training should provide answers and solutions to matters in which it has very little possibilities to exert an influence on.

However, the description of nowadays world is not fully achieved by considering the financial flows; neither has globalization only one direction nor is there only one ordering logic. Furthermore, the alternative solutions are not limited to putting up a house of cards in the middle of a hurricane. The same technologies and networks that facilitate financial transactions can spread technologies, experiences and build up frameworks of aid and cooperation.

Another frequently announced aspect of globalization, though less noticeable, is that which refers to an assumed tendency towards a cultural, political and economic homogeneity. Nevertheless, it is essential to take into account that the effects produced by financial globalization and commercial liberalisation in both national and local areas result in a great diversity of answers.

Some countries and regions frequently based on certain comparative advantages (such as natural resources, labour force costs and markets accessibility) choose and sometimes obtain benefits from the major mobility of production factors around the world. A considerable amount of nowadays intermediate industrial and mass production regions are concentrated on these areas.

Another visible phenomenon is that the great urban sprawls both in the developed and the developing world are concentrating many of the activities on services of highly added value. The services provided by enterprises, property developers, financial and insurance companies as well as the headquarters of important enterprises are emerging together as never before in the great urban regions. Such concentration of production factors results in sprawl economies that attract research and development activities as well as design activities. Direct foreign investment has also trends to take place in great metropolitan areas.

Among the developing countries, some of the regions that have found their market area are those that, based on their natural attractiveness, have managed to captivate a considerable amount of tourists from all over the world or at least settle relatively prosperous tourism industries.

Such alternative ways or insertion modes are, however, the exception to the rule. Most often, the countries and regions face serious problems when trying to adapt their economies to new conditions. On the other hand, even in the most successful cases the benefits are not distributed on equal terms. World economic polarisation is reflected within each country and shows regional differences regarding their ability to adapt to the new context. Even within the same regions or localities, they suffer the emergence of dual economies where wealth and highly productive jobs coexist with an increasing informal sector with precarious and low-paid jobs, particularly in the services sector

Still, there exist other possible strategies that national, regional and local societies and economies may adopt. They are derived both from the knowledge of the evolution of entrepreneurial strategies in their most dynamic sectors and from the spread of various outstanding cases of territories which have achieved a successful insertion in the new context based on processes of endogenous development of their competitive advantages. Among the most dynamic enterprises, it has been assumed, for some time now, that the best and the most sound competitiveness strategy is that based on differentiation. But not any differentiation, though. The advantages derived from technological innovation regarding equipment, material or organization and management frameworks are in the end ephemeral. They last for exactly the same time the competition takes to implement them. The real difference lies in what cannot be copied. In this respect, the capital of knowledge available to enterprises can be either in one or in the other category. The available technical knowledge in a productive organization can be generated in another one and it can also migrate. But the way in which such knowledge is put into practice, how it is combined with other non-technical competencies and, above all, how the organization is capable of managing and generating knowledge can hardly be reproduced. It is to this competitive advantage that specialised literature refers to when it talks about organizations that learn or intelligent organizations.

In the same way, several regions around the world have succeeded in sustaining economic and productive processes by means of creating competitive advantages. Such competitive advantages are also based on a differentiation obtained from an original combination of advantages in some cases comparative and in some others –and above all- competitive. Again, in these cases, the capital of knowledge available in one territory can be considered as something already given and more or less fixed and therefore this can be reproduced in other places of the country or the world. But the region can also generate and manage the knowledge and it may turn into a region that learns or into an intelligent region.

These strategies are quite different from the globalization concept which implies a tendency towards homogeneity. At the same time, they have the advantage of reinforcing the possibility of action of national, regional and local actors apart from their sole reaction or adaptation to this tendency. The role played by vocational training institutions in such strategies and more specifically by their centre networks is under no doubt fundamental. Apart from the qualifications level available in every country or territory which has been improved by these institutions, they are working in terms of the goals set by the communities they assist and the productive and social networks that characterise them.

An integral outlook at nowadays world from the point of view of vocational training would not be such if the place that labour has within our societies is not properly considered. Some streams of thought predicted that human labour was soon going to be restricted to a very limited sector of the population and it would have very different characteristics from the ones already known, or even it would become extinct. These beliefs were firstly based on technological advances that involved a great automatisation in the industrial production and services sector and therefore a considerable loss of working posts. The predictions were both optimistic and pessimistic. The former supported the belief of a superior stage of civilisation by retrieving ancient utopias in which the work would be done by machines hardly supervised by individuals while most of the human beings would be involved in intellectual and cultural development. On the other hand, the pessimistic view predicted a new middle age with islands of modernity and abundance and great oceans of poverty and exclusion. Neither in one hypothesis nor in the other was there much room for vocational training as such.

But again, reality has been much more complex and diverse than any prediction. There coexists automatisation and robotics with intensive sectors of work force. Flexible specialisation exists side by side with mass production. Many times, design and development processes as well as that of services supply which are done virtually all around the world, are not accomplished without the direct contact among people and the contributions that certain social or business environment referring to territories provide. Production processes are distributed and extended to various countries and continents and industrial clusters are also entwined. International enterprises are joining small and medium-sized enterprises in international territories as well as traditional enterprises in traditional territories.

One clear conclusion can be drawn: the typical way of organizing work in the societies of last century –particularly the Western ones– was the wage-earning employment. This particular historic way is relatively becoming less and less important. Alternatively, there emerge new ways which we still call “non-typical” in spite of their significance, and it is not yet clear what the logical way of organizing human work would be like, in the case of one prevailing among others.

The other conclusion, even much more important, is that stated by ILO’s Director General: “deep-rooted significance of work for all people everywhere […] (and work as a)… defining feature of human existence.”. This appears constantly in all cultures and in all levels of development. Work comprises three dimensions: it is a means for sustaining a life and fulfilling the basic needs; it is the activity by which people strengthen their own identity both to themselves and to the rest and finally it is crucial for the exercise of personal choices, family welfare and social stability.

Thus, we face a double challenge: building up development processes that promote the generation of employment both with sufficient quantity and quality. Fighting against the considerable deficiency of decent work in our societies is the essential goal pursued by ILO in order to comply with the demand of the countries. In this respect, vocational training becomes both a requirement for the achievement of decent work for everyone and an integral part of such concept.

All things considered, it is possible to observe that the field of action of vocational training has not been reduced; on the contrary it has extended and diversified. Even if it does not represent the only solution for the shortage of employment, it plays a crucial role within the employment expansion strategies as well as within the policies that attempt to keep up the quality of the diverse forms of work. Vocational training institutions and their centres cannot trigger national, regional or local developmental processes unilaterally or on their own. However, it is very difficult to imagine an integral and continuous development strategy without their influence.

The role of vocational training is not only restricted to the most dynamic and modern sectors of the economy nor is it a mere cushioning network for the marginalised social sectors. There is no such dilemma between a “social” vocational training and a “productivist” vocational training. The vocational training that takes into account the historical moment in which it has to play a role contributes jointly with other fields to accelerate the developmental processes and takes part in all the efforts being made to obtain more productivity and competitiveness as well as more equality and social integration.

Vocational training shall continue preparing people for work. This shall not change. And it shall keep on doing this in terms of “...improve the ability of the individual to understand and, individually or collectively, to influence the working and social environment [...] and enable all persons, on an equal basis and without any discrimination whatsoever, to develop and use their capabilities for work in their own best interests and in accordance with their own aspirations, account being taken of the needs of society” as stated in the International Labour Convention 142. Nowadays, this is not only applicable to wage-earning employment but to all types of work. Exerting an influence on the working conditions and the social environment implies the possession of a number of abilities that permits not only acquiring technical knowledge and other sorts of knowledge but also being able to manage them and, above all, managing one’s own professional and labour processes. That is to say, developing the ability of management of knowledge that belongs not only to people but also to productive organisations, territories and countries.