Website developed with the support of the
Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC)

Training for labour market access; for citizenship and also for gender perspective:
linked, transversal and interdependent dimensions in the training policies

Return to the graph

The changes in the organisation and also in the nature of work together with the crisis of the labour market (unemployment and informality) challenge the concept of a profession or an occupation and they not only outline a wider and more dynamic conception to the meaning and contents of work in itself but also they demand some new requirements from those who are currently working. Given the fact that technical contents loose momentum due to the dynamism of the innovations within the working process, while skills, competencies and general knowledge related to management, among them team work, as well as tolerance to uncertainty gather relevance regarding job performance, it will no longer be enough to centre the training practices exclusively only on the technical contents.

Toolbox >> Conceptual materials >> Teaching materials/ Applications >> Results and impacts

Training competencies exclusively focused in contents do not identify either the subjects to whom they are being addressed or their contextual background, be said contents current and the best to be had - technically or otherwise. Therefore, in order to allow our target segments a more successful and enriching working and/ or professional life, we have to be able to furnish them permanently not only with a nurturing new kind of knowledge but, fundamentally, they must be given a new approach to learning. A learning that, in times of change and uncertainty, contributes by permanently supplying new knowledge and arrange for new road openings which will lead to first to occupational motives before leading them to predictable and stable employment. That is to say, the requirement calls for the kind of training preparing for labour market insertion as it is defined by the Recomendación 195 de la OIT sobre el Desarrollo de Recursos Humanos: educación, formación y aprendizaje permanente / ILO Recommendation 195 on the Development of Human resources: education, formation and permanent learning : quote: "as the gathering of all competencies and transferable qualifications" that reinforce the capacities and the capacity of people: " to find, to create, to conserve, to enrich any activity and to pass said activity from one to another obtaining from it some kind of reward, be it of a personal, economic, social or a professional nature." 1 This conception of employment moves away all other possible definitions such as considering it as an equivalent to "entry into working life " allowing only for it to be understood as the gathering of those personal, social and technical competencies required by people in order to manage their own professional and labour processes within a given scenario where employment needs to be created by means of enterprising competencies, and co-operation strategies. " 2 This new learning type can no longer be bounded to a stage at the beginning of the working life, but rather it consists on being trained all along throughout a whole life of continuos learning. Also, it would be wrong to consider it only as a result of specific training actions since it also aims to train those target persons in how to achieve the required results for the corresponding professional actions. It also tries to make them understand the reasons behind those very acts, together with all related / implied facts and impacts enhancing their capacity to relate to knowledge and to transfer said knowledge to different situations or of adapting it to new social and labour contexts. The required competencies have to do with the contexts of the lives of each one of the involved players and therefore, they should be supplied and connected through all the necessary conditions to be able to both be inserted and to socially participate in the process. As never before, the worker's training - be them men or women - converges with the citizen's training - be them males or females . In both cases, it is essential to act within the three fundamental dimensions within life development : the right kind of relationship with one-self ; relationships towards the others (family life, participating in a wider social space) and lastly, those other relationships with the environment. In all the cases it is necessary to be able to express and communicate, to be able to make decisions, being able to choose, of understanding the circles surrounding your life, to be able to evaluate the complexities of life, the systemic approach to said reality, team work, solidarity, participation, caring for oneself as well as for others, etc. Now then, the concepts of: a) access to the labour market and b) citizenship are related with those processes taking place at different levels, such as structural, normative, cultural. But employability and citizenship are also related to some factors of personal and relational character which are also connected to the tangible life context of each one of the subjects, resulting in differences and inequities in getting the right necessary resources leading to employment opportunities or else, for the generation of those productive activities, in the participation and taking of decisions regarding all pertaining to community or group matters. Therefore, the problems of employment and the condition of citizenship of the target population means to analyse and to connect the following: the productive and labour context the already existent gender marks in the labour field the characteristics of the subjects the gender conditions the vocational training offers " gender marks" present within the modes and contents and of training offers Therefore, the improvement and/or strengthening of the employability and citizenship should be a high-priority objective of the training policies and also that is why they necessarily need to be approached from the gender perspective. The gender perspective is: an instrument to better analyse that reality currently questioning the relationships of power that that can be found between males and women and at the core of all social relationships in general; a conceptual framework, an interpretative methodology guiding all decisions, widening the scope, modifying the perception, creating new concepts, analysing attitudes to identify those biases and gender conditionings which are responsible for unfair non-equivalent social systems - facilitating by means of the dialogue, not only to acknowledge them as facts but also to acknowledge the need for revision and modification. The gender perspective helps to perceive how the human groups, starting from biological differences, build the concepts of masculinity and femininity, attributing to them a range of symbolical competencies, performance possibilities and different evaluation points both to women and to men. When these socially built " naturalisations" become visible, this socially built methodology contributes to interpret the other mechanisms responsible for discrimination or social exclusion which by acting together, give power to those other ones related to gender (age, educational level, poverty, violence, etc.). The labour scenario is played by sexual subjects building their own identity around them therefore one of the primal components of their life project, self-proclamation and social evaluation for men as much as for women. Also, it is the elemental source of socially belonging, social inclusion. But, for women it also implies modifying that ancient pattern assigned to them as life projects, that of dedicating themselves only to reproductive and not remunerated work, which means an extra burden to be overcome to pass through the social barriers and prejudices still ruling women's rights and capacities and which today slow down the advance of equal opportunities. Horizontal and vertical professional segmentation is one of the most notorious facts. Vocational training also has its own responsibilities in this segmentation, reproducing it and reinforcing it with its own internal barriers. To be able to contribute not only at surpassing those diverse inclusions but also to improve their quality and relevancy, gender perspective has to be infused and transversalized through all the definition of its contents, through methodologies, through the terms of offer construction as well as through the whole institutional practice Employability, citizenship and gender perspective are, therefore, interdependent dimensions that conceive people, in their whole integrity and in their social and gender conditions. Also they are perceived as active protagonists of their training and labour insertion processes. In order to do it, they should necessarily be adopted as mainstreaming approaches in the policies design and management. --------------------- 1 - Ducci, María Angélica. La formación al servicio de la empleabilidad, Inter-American Technical Bulletin of Vocational training n.142, Montevideo, Cinterfor, 1998. 2 - Salle, M.A. Report on Gender and Vocational Training. 1st Latin American Seminar on Gender and Vocational Training, organised by INAFORP and the Program of Equality Promotion (PROIGUALDAD), Panama, October 17-19, 2000.

 

 

The Inter-American Centre for Knowledge Development in Vocational Training (ILO/Cinterfor)
Avda. Uruguay 1238 - Montevideo - Uruguay - Tel: (5982) 908 6023 - 902 0557 - 908 0545 - Fax: (5982) 902 1305
webmaster@cinterfor.org.uy

Copyright © 1996-2008 International Labour Organisation (ILO) - Disclaimer