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

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Competency based training in Ministries of Education

In Brazil, the SEMTEC (Secretary of Secondary and Technological Education) and the Ministry of Education are developing the Vocational Education Expansion Project (PROEP), a wide-ranging effort centered on vocational education oriented to training for work. The project aims at putting into practice some of the innovations introduced by the Law of Basic Guidelines of Education in Brazil (Law 9394 of 1996). Among other things, this law facilitates an improved connection between training with an academic educational character and training for work, and it marks the boundaries between the system of middle level or secondary education and that of vocational training.

The objective of PROEP centers on expansion, modernization, the improvement of quality and the constant updating of vocational education in Brazil, through adjusting curriculums to the needs of the world of work, qualifying and re-qualifying workers irrespective of their educational level, and training and updating young people and adults at the level of technicians and technologists.

Among the various components involved, what stands out are curricular development through modules based on competencies, observation of the performance on the work market of people graduating from the courses as a source of curricular updating, and the recognition and certification of the competencies developed both inside and outside the educational ambit.

Joint experiences of Ministries of Education and of Labor: The "Chile Learns More" Program of Permanent Education and Training.

This project was launched in April 2002 with the aim of creating a permanent education and training system which would contribute to the development of the country and to improving people's opportunities to progress. It is a joint initiative from the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Labor and Social Security through the National Service of Training and Employment (SENCE). It also has support from the Ministries of the Economy and of Agriculture, and from a private source, the Chile Foundation.

The project will orient appreciable increases in investment in human resources to raising literacy levels, especially among the active population, in an attempt to repair the deficiencies in the educational and training systems in meeting the development needs of the country. It will also focus on improving technical training to make it more effective in responding to the needs of national development, and to do so it will tackle the problems of coverage, quality and curricular coordination between the different training levels.

It also covers the ambit of competency recognition by developing evaluation and certification mechanisms in a national system to facilitate training so as to be able to generate mechanisms to respond to detected needs, which, through evaluation and certification, would reinforce the improvement in the quality of the offer of training.

The project is geared to those sectors of the active population that need to improve their competency levels and their levels of literacy and schooling, and it also covers young people and workers at the level of technical education and higher level technicians.

Among the components which make up the design of the project are the development of new possibilities for education and permanent training, which include the adult population, with open and flexible educational modalities and with financing mechanisms which would encourage the leveling of studies and the utilization of public financing schemes like tax exemption which exist in Chile.

Four areas of response of Chile Qualifies: 1- Leveling studies. 2- Labor training. 3- Improve technical training. 4-Certify labor competencies. www.sence.cl

Another component is oriented to improving the quality and the organization of technical training by widening and improving the offer of quality at this level. In this way the development of decentralized technical training projects in the different regions of the country will be promoted, and there are funds that are open to competition for increasing the offer by promoting the setting up networks or associations which would link training institutions for technicians with industry and with local government in the provinces.

There is a plan to develop a national system of competency norms and technical training itineraries which includes the preparation of a national framework of labour competencies and of the components of competency evaluation and certification, the assurance of quality in the training offered, improvement and adjustment in the offer of training, and technical training programs that are connected, open and sequential.

The project has also taken account of the need to train teachers, and to set up an information system about education and training.

The management of the program has a national level which is made up of the Ministries of Education, Labour and Economics, and the National Coordination of the Program. There is also a regional level which, through the regional management of the program, is able to undertake the identification of needs, and decentralized execution with the participation of local agents. The program went into action in 2002, and it has a projected time span of six years.

 

 

 

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