COMPETENCY BASED TRAINING IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN
Recent developments. Some experiences. January 2003

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CONOCER emerges as a co-ordinator of a scheme through which people can have access to continuous training schemes based on standards that are fixed consensually by the industrial, labour and educational sectors. Using the certified labour competency model it is possible to: * Acknowledge people's work experience through officially valid recognition which certifies that the person in qualified to perform a productive function. * Open up possibilities for continuous training throughout people's productive lives so that they are not made redundant by technological progress or a lack of training. * Maintain a constant state of updating the links between the content of the training and the requirements of the work market. The CONOCER is itself defined as an entity of quality, whose objective is to improve the quality of companies, of workers, and of the training institutions in the country.

The CONOCER experience in Mexico

CONOCER, the Occupational Competency Standardisation and Certification Council, was set up following a government initiative in Mexico. This body has its own strong identity, and it functions as a supervisory body in the framework of a private trust15.

The Council is made up of six representatives from the management sector, six from the social sector, five from the workers, one from the agricultural sector, and six from the public sector. The CONOCER is responsible for planning, operating, fostering and updating the standardized system of labour competency certification in Mexico. The system covers the competency identification, standardization, training and certification phases, which means that there is total cover of the phases of labour competency.

This body is involved in carrying out a wide-ranging program of restructuring the offer of human resources training. Its sources of financing are the World Bank and to a lesser extent from the IDB. The first 8 standardization committees were set up in 1996, and by January 2003 there were 62 such committees and 9 sub-committees operating in that same number of occupational sectors. The work of the committees has resulted in the preparation of 601 technical norms of labour competency. The system has already led to the setting up of 31 certifying bodies and 970 evaluation centres, and more than 116,000 competency units have been awarded certification.

The standardization committees are groups made up of management and workers, usually in economic sectors that are representative of a work activity (e.g. footwear manufacture or sugar production). They have technical support from CONOCER, and their task is to identify competencies and formulate the respective norms.

WHAT IS A QUALIFICATION? A labour qualification is a group of competency units and their elements. It specifies the criteria and the forms of evaluation, through efficient performance, and the knowledge, skills and dexterities required for the competency.

The CONOCER is defined as an organization which uses standards in promoting the generation of labour competency qualifications, and also the certification of these qualifications based on the real requirements of companies. The CONOCER is itself defined as an entity of quality, whose objective is to improve the quality of companies, of workers, and of the training institutions in the country.

This experience has led to the appearance of novel concepts in the context of national training systems, like the consequences that flow from the emergence of the concept of ensuring quality. This does not just refer to the quality of competency certificates themselves, but also to the quality of training institutions. Three different angles on quality are identified and promulgated in the context of the CONOCER's work: the quality of companies, the quality of training institutions and the quality of people's work.

The object of labour competency certification is the quality of work and the quality in industrial processes for the series of ISO norms, and the same could be said of the quality of the certification of training quality. This theme is still only in its early stages in the region but CONOCER's work has begun to clarify it, as have the experiences of other institutions like INA in Costa Rica, SENATI in Peru and SENAI in Santa Catarina in Brazil.

The CONOCER is without doubt the most advanced standardization system in Latin America. The determined participation of key business sectors from the Mexican economy is a sign of its success in the development of labour competencies.

One aspect of this which has become very important in Latin America is the certification of competencies that are acquired outside the training process. The certification component of CONOCER presents an open process in which the worker can solicit a certification body for evaluation and recognition of his labour competency under one of the norms that are already available.

CONOCER's certification process involves the participation of an evaluation body and a certification body. The former evaluates the competencies according to the demonstrations embodied in the corresponding norm, while the latter awards the certificate based on the results of the evaluation.

The stages which CONOCER has designed for the certification of a candidate are as follows:

1. Prior diagnosis in which the candidate's chances of obtaining certification in the desired competency are analyzed.
2. Evaluation carried out by an evaluator based on demonstrations specified in the norm.
3. Report on the candidate's evaluation result. He may be competent, in which case the certificate is awarded, or not yet competent, in which case the causes for this are analyzed and he is offered training which could lead him to successfully pass the evaluation test in the future.

 

 

 

 

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15. Further information is available at: www.conocer.org.mx

 

 

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